


Like the Jack of Hearts

by LadyJanelly



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Boom Town, Gold Rush AU, M/M, PTSD, Western AU, post-civil-war au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-02-07 09:47:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 31,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21456031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyJanelly/pseuds/LadyJanelly
Summary: Years later, Jamie will tell the child on his knee about the first time Tyler rode into town. He’ll say the sun was shining and glinting off of the silver conchos on Tyler’s saddle. How he’d looked like a story-book prince, riding in on his gray horse, so tall and handsome.Tyler will laugh when he hears it, and shake his head.It’s late spring, when Tyler rides into camp, another mud-covered body moving through the misting, late-afternoon rain. His shoulders are hunched under the oiled canvas of his slicker and his face hidden by the dripping brim of his hat.
Relationships: Jamie Benn/Tyler Seguin
Comments: 188
Kudos: 197





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've got 45k of this written and I see a path to the end of the story, so I'm going to start posting it here.

Jordie is seventeen years old the first time he sees his little brother kill a man. 

It’s spring, the sprouts of the next harvest just breaking ground, the threat of frost hanging over their hopes for the year. 

A new batch of runaways is in Mama’s kitchen, hungry and tired. Earlier than any had dared come this far north the year before. Jordie figures that things must be bad down south for them to brave the cold, the chance of a late-season blizzard catching them still on the Railroad. 

They’re safe now, on this side of the border, safer at least. It just seems decent hospitality for him to offer to go shoot some rabbits to add to the stew that Mama is cooking up. Give them a good meal before Papa drives them over to the church in the morning in his wagon. 

So he goes out, and Jamie, short and pudgy and determined Jamie, fifteen years old and so awkward, he follows after Jordie, his own light rifle on his shoulder. 

Jordie will remember, years later, trying to shoo him back inside. Warning him that his noise will scare the game, that they’ll never catch anything with Jamie’s clumsy steps rustling the underbrush.

He turns back to look where he’s going and there’s a man in their field. A rifle cracks the silence from behind Jordie and the man falls without a word. Jordie registers, too late, that the man had his gun out, that his gun had been pointed at Jordie. Jordie who’d looked like the danger, tall as a man and growing his first beard. Not little Jamie. 

“He was gonna shoot you,” Jamie says, sounding as stunned as Jordie feels. 

Jordie checks the treeline, but nobody else is out there, or they’ve already run off. He rolls the man onto his back with his boot. The rabbit-gun is not much use for killing people, but Jamie’d put that bullet through the man’s left eye and the thin bone behind it and right into his brain. 

“Go get Papa. Don’t spook our guests,” Jordie says, not wanting Jamie to see more of this than he has to. 

It’s the first time Jordie’s seen a man killed either, and his hands are shaking so hard he can’t make them stop. 

Jamie shakes his head. “What if there’s more of them? I’m not leaving you out here alone.” 

Jordie looks up to ask what he’s planning to do with an empty rifle but Jamie’s already taken up Jordie’s loaded one.

Jordie steels his nerve and opens the man’s jacket, searching for papers. There’s a thick stack of runaway posters, drawings of dark faces that might be among those in the Benn’s kitchen. Not that slave catchers are real discerning about who they bring back. Strange enough that one would cross the border, but the bounties must have made him brave. 

In the end, Jamie won’t leave without Jordie, so the two of them walk back to the house, Jamie watching Jordie’s back as they go back inside. 

They bury the man behind the barn. Papa tells the conductor, but it doesn’t change anything, doesn’t keep them from doing right the next time a group makes its way up the Railroad to their station.

=======

The recruiter from the Union comes the summer of ‘62. Comes for Jordie, nearly twenty by then, tall and strong. Looks at Jamie but doesn’t waste breath trying to bring him into the conflict, despite Jamie suddenly coming into his height, his baby fat distributing over his body and making him big all over. His face is still soft and sweet. Doe eyes and a shy demeanor. The recruiter isn’t the first to take him for slow and Jordie is in no rush to correct him. Better for Jamie to stay where it’s safer. The trains keep coming, even as war tears through the towns and farms where other stations are. 

Papa won’t have it, Jordie going off to war, but it’s the most worthwhile thing for fighting over that Jordie’s ever heard of. They say Lincoln is gonna free the slaves, but if the South wins, nothing will change. This is their chance, to be a part of a solution that’ll stick. A final end to their family’s work. 

So Jordie goes. Sneaks out in the middle of the night, planning to meet the recruiter just south of the river. Jamie catches up to him a few miles down the road. Slips into step with him, silent at his side. 

“If your reasons are good, they’re good enough for me too,” Jamie says, and Jordie can’t argue with his own words so he doesn’t.

==========

Jamie’s good at killing. Him and Jordie end up with a group of irregulars. Hunters and trackers. Boys like them who’d been raised slipping people across borders and traveling by night. Jordie can do his part. Makes his first kill a month into it. Jamie’s already killed three more men before then. He’s the complete package, their commander says. Can shoot a man from a distance. Tangle with them up close. Take a man down silent with a blade or with his bare hands. As the war goes on, Jamie starts planning more of their actions. Smart and calculating. 

The men think he’s made of stone, but Jordie sees it. The hollowness growing behind Jamie’s eyes with every man he puts in the ground. He stops saying much that isn’t about the job. Stops smiling all together. 

And then the war ends, and for the Benn brothers it’s sudden enough that it’s like stepping into a hole hidden by long grass. A whole nation is left burnt black and weeping, wounded but not killed. 

They get word that their Papa got sick and passed. Their sister Jenny’d gotten married and traveled east. Mama’d sold the farm and moved into town. 

They drift. Jamie stops talking for most of a year. Jordie catches him sometimes, just sitting and staring down at his hands. They work. Spend some time on the docks of New York. The money’s good, but neither of them’s made for the city. 

The first words Jamie says in months are “Think we could head somewhere that doesn’t smell like a sewer?” 

“Your face smells like a sewer,” Jordie says, but inside he’s dancing a jig. Jamie’s comimg back to him.

===================

Jamie drowns in the war. Loses every part of himself that isn’t killing or watching out for Jordie. By the end of it, he’s taken more lives than he has hairs on his chin.

After, when the dark work is done, Jamie looks up from the bottom of a well, through fifty feet of murky water at the faint glint of sunlight above. He stirs, Jordie’s voice in his ears. “Let’s just make it up to New York. Word is there’s jobs there.” 

So Jamie walks, his body going through the motions while his mind tries to move, stirring up eddies in the blood-dark water. Jordie finds them jobs. So many of the healthy young men went to war and never came back that there’s more work than hands. On the dock Jamie puts in his hours, lifting and moving crates, saying the few words he needs to to get the job done. 

Jamie works, and he swims towards the light above. Through water thick and clingy as molasses. Towards the sound of his brother’s voice. Jordie waits for him, leads him through their days. 

Sometimes, when Jamie is so close to the surface he thinks he could stretch and touch air with his fingertips, he aches for the harm he’s doing his brother. Jordie living his life for Jamie. Staying when he should be moving forward. 

He wakes one night, the urge to just walk off of a pier and let the water take him so strong that he balls up his fists to fight it. Sits on the edge of his bed, jaw clenched and feet planted on the boards until Jordie finds him there in the morning.

He’s not sure how long he drifts, but the seasons change and change again, and one spring evening his face breaks the water and he gets his first breath of air in ages. Breathes deep and blinks around. Clicks into place in his own body and sees the world clear.

It’s easier to complain than to speak of his gratitude or his relief or to let himself feel the ache of the lost time. 

In the language of brothers, Jordie quips back at him.

They start planning, half-hearted, of leaving the stink of the city. Jamie doesn’t want to drag Jordie from one soul-crushing job to another, though. They talk of heading home to Ontario. Running a trap line for furs, or getting on with a logging company. The pay’s good, but there’s no future in it. No life that Jordie will be able to bring a wife to. They start saving their income, thinking maybe another farm somewhere.

It’s Jordie that finds the notice in the paper. Black Hills Gold! It says and Jamie tilts his head as he reads of the gold rush that’s started. Hopeful men from all over the continent heading to the territories in hope of making their fortune. 

“Which of us do you see panning a stream?” he asks and Jordie smiles, warm and so clever.

“We’re not going to go mine a claim,” Jordie tells him, and Jamie feels a swell of possibility in his chest. “We’re gonna open the general store.”

==========


	2. Chapter 2

The first year is the hardest. The early months are spent gathering resources, soliciting investors, getting what loans they can. The train takes them, their driver Daley, and their goods as far as Cheyenne. From there they join their wagon with some others headed the same way— Lindy Ruff with his wagons full of liquor crates and mattresses, telling them stories of the fine hotel in the wilderness he plans to open soon. Dillon, a tall man with long dark hair who is bringing the tools to start a livery stable and ferrier. 

Three more wagons of goods are on the same trail, and a dozen men with gold dust in their eyes. A few are mounted but most of them walk the twenty miles a day, their earthly possessions packed on their backs. 

The town of Bright Star is more rightly called a camp. The vast majority of the structures are tents, or short log walls topped with canvas roofs. Ruff’s hotel is going up, bright pine planks from Cheyenne being nailed onto a log-built framing. 

They send Daley back down to the city for the next load and set their shop on the driest patch of ground they can afford. Their first store is nothing but a tent and a trestle table with pick axes and mining pans, boots and gloves, the delicate glass of kerosene lanterns, tins of coffee and sugar. On a canvas on the ground, they display bedrolls and tents, bulkier supplies. At night, they bring all the merchandise inside and sleep on opposite ends of the tent to discourage pilfering. 

They build up the physical building as much as they work to add stock and the space to display it. That first winter, they’ve got wooden walls but a double layer of canvas roof above them, a pot-bellied wood-burning stove in the middle to keep it above freezing inside. 

Jordie worries at first, that bringing Jamie into hardship will push him silent again. That it’ll be too much for Jamie to bear. He watches instead, as Jamie rises to the challenge, as he goes stubborn when a buyer tries to haggle past reason. When he notices the few unattached children running around and slips them a slice of the bread the Benns buy from the hotel kitchen. 

Jamie becomes _present_ in a way that Jordie feared he’d never see again. Quieter than the kid he’d been before the war, before he followed Jordie into hell, but he jokes sometimes in his dry way. Smiles contented at a job well-done. He still wakes Jordie once or twice a fortnight, harsh breathing in the darkness of their little shop. He starts getting into fights. Catches a man holding one of the kids against a wall and near kills him. Jamie likes things peaceable, and if it takes a short fight for a long quiet, he seems willing to make that trade. 

Jordie teases that they’ll put a silver star on him if he keeps this up, and Jamie snorts and shakes his head.

Jordie watches as people start to come to Jamie with their problems— Ruff with a hotel patron who won’t leave and won’t pay. Dillon with two men who both claim the same horse is theirs. 

Jordie watches, and thinks maybe he wasn’t joking as much as either of them thought he was.

=====

“Jamie! Jamie, come quick!” Ezra bursts in through the mercantile door, eyes wide and his little shoulders heaving. Ezra is twelve and on his own, his father having brought him out to the Dakotas and then disappeared into the night a few months later. Dead or run off, nobody knows. Ezra runs errands for folk over at the hotel-and-saloon. A year after Ruff had opened it, he’d run into some troubles and needed quick cash. He’d sold off the least profitable half of the business (the hotel, not the saloon) to a man named Teezedale, who’d brought in a half-dozen ladies and started a merry flow of brothel customers through the place. Jamie’s been called for arguments over the state of the stairs and conflicts over who’s customers are overusing the privy behind the place. If this is one more bit of stupidity from those two, he’s gonna start charging them for his time. 

“Tweezer’s beatin’ on Red Molly again. He’s like to kill her this time.” 

Well shit.

Jamie grabs his gunbelt from under the counter and heads for the door, strapping it on as he goes. It’s mostly for show. He likes to think he’s done with killing, and having the weapon makes it less likely that some fool will push him to the point where he breaks their neck to keep them from hurting him or someone else.

He hesitates on the threshold of the store, glances back at Jordie and Jordie shoos him out. “Go. I got it.” Daley’s due in with another load any time—the runner’s already come up from the trail to tell them he’s less than half a day out. If Jamie’s not back by then, Jordie’ll have to close shop until the load’s brought in or he’ll have to ask Daley to either sit on the wagon or move it all by himself. 

Jamie nods and follows Ezra out, his resolve to finish this once and for all growing as he trots down the raised boardwalks that have spanned over the muddy tracks in the two years the town’s been growing. 

The saloon is too quiet for the middle of the day, the thuds and screams from the women in the rooms above loud in the stillness. Most of the men have left the building, and those that stayed stare up at the ceiling like the useless peckerwoods they are. 

Jamie takes the stairs two at a time, but the screams stop before he gets to the mid-point landing. Tweezer’s still yelling though, a woman shouting back. 

“…beat you too, woman! You put that blade down!” Tweezer yells as Jamie turns the corner and can see into the bedroom that the ruckus is coming from.

Red Molly is curled up on the floor, half-naked and covered with welts and bruises, her cherry-red hair in a disarray covering her face. Tweezer is a half-step back from her, a length of knotted rope in one hand, the other balled up into a fist. 

Julie Chu has the other end of the rope, and a straight razor in her other hand, her lips curled back from her teeth and her eyes blazing with fury. It’s a stand-off; Jamie can see that in a second. If she swings with the razor and misses, Tweezer’ll have her. If Tweezer throws a punch and doesn’t connect hard, she’ll cut him open. 

Jamie steps in, grabs Julie’s arm and swings her around behind him, trusting that he’d have to give her some kind of reason to slice him in the back. A second long stride takes him over Red Molly and into Tweezer, grabbing him by the throat and shoving him back, pinning him against the wall. 

“Enough,” Jamie says, feels the dark water creeping in on the edges of his mind, lapping cold and wet at his self control. 

Tweezer gapes like a fish on the shore, mouth opening and closing. Jamie can feel the panicked bob of his Adam’s apple under his thumb. He forces his hand to open from around Tweezer’s throat. Tweezer wheezes and bends half over. He finds his courage down there, comes up loud and full of an authority he hasn’t earned. He points at Julie, draws himself up. 

“Sheriff, arrest that woman,” he barks. “She pulled a blade on me. She should be hanged! Hanged!” 

Jamie turns in time to catch Julie from rushing Tweezer. Gets hold of her wrist and holds it tighter and tighter until she drops the razor.

“Fine!” she says, her chin up in challenge. “Hang me then. Just do the girls and you and every person in this camp a favor and let me slit his throat first.”

“Wait,” Jamie says. He’s not loud. He’s never loud, but the word cuts through and she sputters to a stop, frowns and steps back, cradling her wrist against her chest. To the side, a pair of ladies in corsets and bloomers are picking Molly off of the floor, helping her to stand. The soft sounds of her crying itches the roof of Jamie’s mouth. 

“This ends,” Jamie says to Tweezer. “The beatings and the fighting and the squabbles with Ruff.” His mind flips through a list of solutions, ways this can end without him putting a bullet in Tweezer’s head, without putting his hands back around his neck and squeezing until the struggles stop.

“How much you got tied up in this hotel?” he asks, and Tweezer gapes at him.

“What?”

“How. Much. Invested?” Jamie says it slow and plain.

Tweezer narrows his eyes. “Near three thousand dollars,” he says. 

“He only paid three for the hotel,” Julie cuts in. “He’s been running at a profit for near a year by what all the girls say.” Julie only got to Bright Star a month ago, and Jamie wonders at her making it her business to know such things. 

Jamie takes a breath. Adds up the store’s recent profits in his head, calculates what they can spare. “I’ll give you two, and you’ll take it and go start fresh somewhere else.”

Tweezer turns red, his cheeks blotchy with anger. “That’s robbery! I got a year of my life spent in this decrepit little town. You can’t send me off with nothing to show for it.”

“You take my money and go,” Jamie says, low and level. “Or I call a council of the business owners and we decide if you get run off with nothing at all, for disturbing the peace of our _decrepit little town._”

Tweezer fumes and fusses, but eventually he huffs “Damn you, I’ll take the money.”

==========

Jordie cocks an eyebrow when Jamie comes back. Doesn’t look like Daley got there while Jamie was occupied, which is a small blessing.

“I need a contract written up,” Jamie says. “Deed of sale for the hotel portion of the Bright Star hotel and saloon.”

He leaves Tweezer there in the shop and climbs the ladder up to the loft, where they store the bulk of their goods. Jamie and Jordie’s cots are up there, and what little personal space they have. Jamie gets the lockbox out of the crate marked ‘boots’ and uses the key on his watch-chain to open it. Two thousand is cutting it close, committing them to another year here at least, hoping the veins of gold don’t run dry. They’ll have enough to keep the merchandise flowing, but their buffer against emergencies will be frightfully thin. 

Jordie has the document drawn up by the time Jamie gets back down. Tweezer signs it with an angry flourish and storms back towards the hotel. 

“Only seems neighborly to help the man pack,” Jordie says. He says it teasing almost. He doesn’t look angry by Jamie taking the reins of their finances. Jamie can think of few things he’d like to do less than spend another hour in Tweezer’s engrossing company, but he nods and follows Tweezer out. He’ll see if Ezra is still around and send him back to give Jordie a hand. 

Julie Chu is on the boardwalk outside the mercantile, a colorful shawl wrapped around her otherwise bare shoulders. He’d thought he’d have a little longer before he had to interact with an…employee. He slows his steps. He’s never spent much time with women who weren’t family. 

Before the war he’d wanted to fit in with all the other boys who’d felt sweet for a girl. Brought handfuls of wildflowers for the girl in his class like the child he was then. After the war, there had been a lot of women back east, more women than there were men. Widows and girls with no father, no dowry. They always brought with them the weight of unmet expectations. If not for themselves, for a friend or daughter or niece, and Jamie disliked being a source of one more disappointment in their lives. 

Jamie doesn’t know who he’d have been without the war, but he hopes he’d be like Jordie—not kind of man who goes and sees whores being run by a man like Tweezer. He’s had no cause to notice how such a thing is supposed to work. 

“Mister Benn,” Julie starts, and Jamie tips his hat. 

“Miss Chu.” 

She steps in beside him as he follows Tweezer back to the hotel, keeping him in sight but leaving room for their conversation to be private.

“The girls are scared. I told them I’d come and ask. They’re worried you’ll kick them out. Shut it down. Leave us working out of a tent somewhere.”

Jamie winces, because all his vague ideas of what direction the hotel was going to progress in were along those lines. He hadn’t thought of where the ladies would go. 

“No. That’s. I won’t kick you out. Just. Do whatever you ladies want to do tonight. I’ll try to have a plan by tomorrow.” 

Julie nods and wraps her shawl tighter. They get to the hotel and she goes one way at the head of the stairs while he goes the other, following Tweezer back to his room. 

Jordie is trying to hide a grin when Jamie comes back.

“So you own a whorehouse now?” 

Jamie pinches between his eyes. It’d taken half the day to get Tweezer packed and on a wagon heading south. 

“We own it.”

Jordie shrugs, easy. Jamie misses the days when Jordie would argue with him, would tell him when he’s being stupid or asking for too much. 

“What the hell are we gonna do with a whorehouse?” Jordie asks the ceiling.

A heavy wagon rumbles to a stop out front and Jamie takes the reprieve. He has to come up with a plan. A way to make this work for their ledger as well as for the women Jamie just took responsibility for. He’ll get Jordie’s advice on it later, but for now the mindless work of unloading a half-ton of merchandise is the most welcome activity he could think of.

============

Jamie intends to make a rough plan for the hotel and then talk to Jordie to refine those plans, but Daley has a bum knee from a fall on the road and unloading the wagon takes longer than they had expected. It’s late when they’re done, and they go up to their room and Jamie’s asleep before he remembers he had one more task to accomplish that day.

He wakes before dawn, Jordie calling his name in the dark. The smell of gunpowder is sharp in his nose, his hands sticky with blood. His lungs burn and his pulse is fast-marching in his ears. 

“Yeah,” he croaks, listens as Jordie rolls over again and goes back to sleep. He sits up, flexes his fingers. The hand he’d had around Tweezer’s throat tingles with the phantom of the man’s stubble, and he rubs it on his thigh until the sensation fades. 

There’s no going back to sleep after that—Jamie would rather face the day on the few hours of rest he’s already gotten than risk slipping back into whatever nightmare had him in its grasp.

He gets up, dresses in the dark and goes down the sloped ladder that they use as a stair. He stirs the embers in the the pot-bellied stove and pours a pot of water from the storage cask to make coffee with. He sits while it boils, and stares at the shadows cast by the slim slices of fire visible through the grates in the cast iron. 

He dozes, sitting up and staring into the flames until the coffee smells scorched and he blinks awake to the acrid stink of it. He takes the pot off the stove and pours himself a tin cup full, scoops some sugar into it and then some more to cover the taste. He leaves the cup to cool and goes to open up the shop—he doesn’t count on catching more business by opening early, but sitting around in the dark is doing him no good at all. 

The sun is just coming up over the town when he unlocks the shutters and opens them to the fresh air. 

Something shuffles on the boardwalk outside the door and Ezra stands up from where he’d been waiting against the wall.

“You awake?” Ezra asks. “Miss Chu said not to wake you, but to bring you over when you were up.”

Jamie runs his hand over his face. “There trouble at the hotel?”

Ezra shakes his head, his dark eyes wide and serious. 

Jamie grunts. “Gimme a minute.” He washes his face and gets his gunbelt just in case. Blinks and tries to feel more alert. He re-locks the shutters and puts on his hat and meets Ezra on the porch. 

He’s halfway to the hotel before he realizes he left his coffee sitting by the stove.

=========

Miss Chu is waiting in the saloon downstairs, and the image she makes is so incongruous with what Jamie expected that he misses a step. Her dress is high-collared and expensive-looking, lace along the edges and tiny glass beads sewn into the trim. He hadn’t known there was a dress like that in the entire town, looking like she could have stepped out of a drawing in a catalog, like the high-society ladies that Jamie sometimes caught glimpses of back in the city. She shifts, and the lantern light inside the saloon shines off of the bottle-green satin. 

The table she’s at is spread with a white lace cloth, a bottle and two shot glasses atop it. She looks up as Jamie comes in and Ezra scampers off. Any sign of the previous day’s unpleasantness is gone, her expression calm and confident.

She gestures to the other chair and Jamie sits down. He doesn’t usually take his hat off in the saloon, but he does now.

“Ma’am,” he says, and she pours him a drink. 

“Mr. Benn. I’m glad you came this morning. I thought perhaps I could make the challenges of taking on the hotel easier for you by making a business proposition.”

He takes a sip of the drink and is glad he did. It’s mellow and fine, too nice to knock back in a rush to drunkenness. 

“I would appreciate whatever insight you have into keeping the hotel peaceable and making a profit.” 

Her lips twitch, not quite a frown, but letting him know he was off the path she was wanting him on. She opens a letter case that Jamie hadn’t noticed before. There’s a sheet of paper inside, covered with elegant handwriting that he can’t read upside down. 

“I’m offering to manage the girls and the rooms they occupy,” Miss Chu says. “Frankly, Mr. Teezedale’s governance had been lacking in vision and consistency. He’d been clearing a profit, but not nearly meeting the potential of the situation. I know what I’m doing, how this works. I can offer you four dollars per night per room that we’re using. We set the prices, choose or reject clients. A year from now, I have the option to buy the hotel from you for twenty percent above what you paid for it.”

She passes the paper over and Jamie skims the contract, does the sums in his head. 

“That’s…almost eight hundred dollars a month,” he says. Add in the dollar or two he’ll get from the other three rooms and he’ll have the money back on his investment in three months or less. 

“It is,” she agrees. 

“I need to show this to my brother. Get his feel on it.”

She nods and refills his drink. “Of course. Take your time. I assume in the meantime you don’t mind if we keep things running?”

He shakes his head. Can’t even imagine what all is involved, much less how he’d find time to do that and the store both.

“Would you like to come upstairs?” her voice is soft, her gaze direct. 

Jamie chokes on nothing but air. Shakes his head again. “No. Ma’am. I think if we are to be business associates we should keep our interactions professional.”

She smiles at him. “Interactions are my profession.”

He feels his lips curving. He doesn’t want to get under her skirts, but he feels himself being put at ease anyway. It’s been a long time since he’s felt the urge to make a new friend. 

“The offer’s open,” she says, and puts the cork back in the bottle. Jamie takes that as his cue to go and leave her to organize her plan. He folds the contract and puts his hat back on.

“Jamie,” she says, and he pauses before the goodbye. “I’m glad we can be partners.” 

He’s not sure what to say to that, so he nods, tips his hat with one last “Ma’am,” and turns to go.


	3. Chapter 3

=============

Years later, Jamie will tell the child on his knee about the first time Tyler rode into town. He’ll say the sun was shining and glinting off of the silver conchos on Tyler’s saddle. How he’d looked like a story-book prince, riding in on his gray horse, so tall and handsome.

Tyler will laugh when he hears it, and shake his head. 

It’s late spring, when Tyler rides into camp, another mud-covered body moving through the misting, late-afternoon rain. His shoulders are hunched under the oiled canvas of his slicker and his face hidden by the dripping brim of his hat. Man and beast both look exhausted.

Jamie looks up at him, sitting dry on the boardwalk in front of the store. Between the hour and the weather, he’d closed the doors a while ago, sitting out and whittling pick-handles out of oak branches. He watches the dull shape of the newcomer sloshing down the street towards him. The man pulls the horse to a stop in front of Jamie’s feet. 

“Store’s closed. Come back tomorrow,” Jamie tells him. “Anything you have to buy, you can buy it then.” He already cleaned the floors and would rather not do the job twice in one day. 

The light catches the man’s face as he turns Jamie’s way. Young. A full dark beard and tired eyes. 

“Was looking to sell, actually. Pawn, if anybody here would do me the favor. Be good to get indoors for a change.”

Jamie argues with himself for another moment and then puts away the whittling knife. 

“What’s your name?”

“Tyler,” the man says. “Seguin.”

“Come on in then. I’m Jamie. Benn.” Jamie says as he points at the “Benn Bros. Mercantile” sign above them, and stands up. Tyler swings out of the saddle, his movements the kind of stiff that even experienced riders have at the end of a long day. 

Tyler follows him inside and Jamie adjusts the flame on the lantern rather than opening the shutters to the dying sunlight. 

“Whatcha got and how much do you need for it?”

“Boarding for my horse,” he starts, and Jamie can respect a man who cares for his animals. “A bath, dinner and breakfast tomorrow. A room for the night and a pretty girl to share it with.”

He’s opening his coat as he talks. Pulls out a silver pocket watch, an ivory cameo with a golden frame. 

Jamie watches and waits. There’s not much market in camp for anything that won’t make the acquisition of gold easier. He can send it back with Daley though, let him make a better deal in Cheyenne, with a broker who’ll sell it on back east for even more. 

Tyler looks at him expectantly, and Jamie makes a ‘come on’ gesture. There’s not much local market for shinies, and a high demand for rooms, food and girls.

With a grumble, a heavy ring with a wheel design picked out in black and yellow cloisonne is added to the offer. 

Tyler hesitates, and when Jamie just stands and waits, he reaches under his coat and pulls out a package wrapped in waxed cloth. Lays it on the counter and unwraps the tiny pistol inside and offers it over. Jamie lifts the weapon, turns it over in his hands. It’s a beauty, a compact over-under Remington Derringer, all delicately etched gold plating and smooth panels of mother-of-pearl. Clean and well-oiled.

Jamie nods. “Yeah. That’ll do it.” He goes into the money box and counts out twenty dollar coins onto the table.

“Pawn,” Tyler confirms before he touches the money. 

“How long?” Jamie asks. 

Tyler smiles then, cool and confident. The smile of a man who seen the world but not yet been crushed by the darker parts of it. “This time tomorrow. I’ll owe you the twenty and five for your trouble.”

Jamie snorts. “As the closest thing to a sheriff in this town, I feel like I should ask how you expect to make that kind of money in one day.”

Tyler’s grin turns sly, teasing like he’s sharing a joke with Jamie. “I’m pretty good with cards,” he admits. 

Jamie’s heart thumps in his chest. He’s not…he’s not _afraid_ of Tyler, of this man standing in his shop with a sunny smile on a rainy day. His lips suddenly seem dry and he moistens then with his tongue.

Jamie takes just a second too long to add anything and Tyler says “You gamble?”

Tyler pulls out a silver coin, runs his thumb over a notch in the edge. “I’ll flip you for it. Everything on the table, winner take all.”

Jamie snorts, feeling like he’s just come back to himself after a second away, and shakes his head. “If I was a gambling man, I’d be out working a claim on some hill.”

Tyler puts the coin back in his pocket. “So, do we have a bargain? See you tomorrow?” 

“Day after’d be fine too,” Jamie says, feeling generous.

Tyler tips his hat. “Pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Benn.”

Jamie watches him leave. Something just changed, and he’s not sure what or how.

He looks down at the swath of mud and water on the floor and gets out the broom. Across the street, he sees Ezra leading Tyler’s horse towards the livery stable. 

It’s near dark then, the night’s noise picking up from the saloon and hotel, so Jamie puts on his hat and heads that way. After the accidental acquisition of the hotel, Jamie’s made it a habit to be around, take his evening meal there. He calls it ‘protecting his investment’ but truth to tell he feels responsible in some ways now, for the women and their futures. To at least make sure they’re safe while they work. Julie’s first change had been to double prices, and a month later double them again. Jamie’d had to quiet a couple loudmouths, but they settled soon enough. There were two thousand men who meant Bright Star when they said ‘town’ and less than thirty women all told, wives and grandmothers included. If the girls want to charge more, there’s always somebody willing to spend. 

He’s inside, sitting at a table and eating a bowl of the all-day-stew when Tyler comes in the back, where there’s a covered walk to the bath house adjacent. He looks years younger, taller and brighter. He’s clipped his beard down short and combed his hair back. He’s not wearing coat nor vest, just a loose fitting white cotton shirt over his dark trousers.

Jamie watches as Tyler gets a bowl of soup, a thick slice of bread and a shot of whiskey and takes it to his own seat. Watches Tyler watching the card table like it’s a play on a stage performed just for his benefit. 

Jamie finishes his food and takes the bowl back and then goes to the bar. Jordie comes down the stairs, one shirttail untucked and his hair mussed, and joins Jamie there.

It takes Jordie half a minute to catch that Jamie’s attention is split. “He gonna be a problem?” Jordie asks, eyes flicking Tyler’s way. Tyler walks his tin bowl back to where it belongs and then looks around the room.

“Not sure,” Jamie replies. 

Tyler smiles then, and crosses to where Julie just finished pairing up a girl and a customer and sending them upstairs. He leans in, and Jamie is too far to hear their conversation, but Tyler’s body language is all deferential flirtation. Smiling and ducking his head. He leans down and whispers in her ear and she looks puzzled. Says something back. 

Julie waves over Lily, one of the new employees Julie had brought in. She’s a sweet girl, delicate and pretty and the youngest of the women. She doesn’t do a lot of ‘specials’ but she’s popular anyway. 

Tyler turns his charm on her, bowing to her as they’re introduced like he’s asking for a dance at a fancy ball. They talk a bit, smiling and leaning in towards each other. Tyler offers her his arm and they walk up the stairs like that. 

A shiver of loss whispers in Jamie’s chest and he has no idea why.


	4. Chapter 4

Jamie isn’t intending to be there when Tyler comes down the next day, but he’s too restless for the shop and Jordie kicks him out to go take a walk and he’s stopping by the hotel to see if Julie has heard from the doctor she’s bringing out to care for the girls, and. And there Tyler is, coming out of a room and around the balcony. Jamie almost doesn’t recognize him as the man who near-drowned in the saddle. He’s wearing a silver and black vest over the clothes from the night before, a hat that sure as hell wasn’t out in that weather. 

Lily comes as far as the top of the stairs with him, sleepy-eyed and her hair mussed. Tyler bows and kisses her hand and shoos her back towards her room, and then he comes down the stairs, sharp eyes taking in the room as he descends. He has an easy way of moving that Jamie envies. Confident and smooth.

Jamie can tell, the moment when Tyler sees him, how the smile on his lips shifts up to include his eyes. 

“Sheriff,” Tyler calls and Jamie’s cheeks heat.

“Not officially,” he corrects. “Near enough, but I’ve dodged the tin star so far.” Mostly because nobody’s ready to pay him yet.

Tyler’s eyebrows do a twitch of acknowledgment but his smile doesn’t falter. 

Jamie changes course to head for the bar, just to have a glass to occupy his hands. 

“Mr. Benn, then,” Tyler says, following where Jamie leads. “What brings you to this fine establishment this early in the day?” 

Jamie snorts and gives Ruff a sign to bring his usual. He doesn’t need to point out that it’s a bit past noon.

“Like to keep an eye on things over here, considering I own the upstairs.”

He counts it as a point scored that Tyler’s eyes go wide and then blink twice as he processes that information. 

“You. Own the brothel.”

Jamie shrugs. “Business arrangements can take unexpected turns in a boom-town like this.”

Ruff puts Jamie’s shot in front of him, but Tyler shakes his head when asked if he’s drinking. 

“Seems a quality operation,” Tyler says. “I’ve been to a brothel or two, and I gotta say I didn’t expect anything near as nice so far from civilization.”

Jamie tips his head back and downs his drink. Takes a breath to get it down without coughing. Tyler seems like the kind of man who is a connoisseur of such places.

“That’s all Julie’s doing, running it. Gonna buy it when she gets up the stake, she says.”

Tyler hums agreeably, leans back against the bar so he can watch Jamie and look over the card tables behind him, the miners who were in early or staying late to lose their latest find of gold flake before they went back to the streams and pits in the hills.

Their silence is companionable. Tyler studying the players, waiting for the right moment. Jamie’s not surprised when he pushes off the bar.

“Time to go to work,” Tyler says, and slips his fingertips into the shallow pocket of his vest and pulls out a silver dollar. The edge is nicked, and Jamie wonders if it’s the last he has. 

“Deal me in, boys,” Tyler tells the nearest table, and men shift their chairs, make room for one more. 

Jamie gets up and heads for the door. Can’t stand to see Tyler lose what looks to be his last dollar, though it doesn’t seem likely. Jamie would rather not be here if his dance with risk turns ugly. He really doesn’t want to be the one to catch Tyler cheating if that’s his game.

Tyler gives him a grin and a tip of his hat as he goes, and Jamie doesn’t have hope to spare for some handsome gambler. He’d wish him luck though, if he still believed in it.

He walks back to the store, where a couple tenderfoot new miners, haggle with Jordie for a better price on their gear. Jamie lingers near the door, looking at the the barrels of salt pork, there if Jordie needs him.

The greenhorns grumble and cuss, but they pay and leave, one jarring his shoulder into Jamie’s as he passes. A few months in the hills will take that starch out of them. 

“You hear that?” Jordie asks when the men are gone. “Like we don’t have the fairest shop around.”

There’s another store, matches the Benn Bros. for price and sometimes a little cheaper, but their pans are thin and their picks made of the poorest iron, rust spots hidden with boot-black. 

“They’ll learn,” Jamie says and Jordie smooths his ruffled feathers.

“Any news when the doc’s getting here?” 

Jamie tries to hide the flinch as he realizes he never spoke with Julie, never even started on the thing he’d gone to do. 

Jordie frowns instead of laughing at him. 

“Trouble?”

Jamie shakes his head. “Not that I can tell, yet. The man from yesterday, tall, short beard.”

Jordie nods that he remembers.

“He figures he’s gonna pay back the twenty dollars loan I gave him on some goods. Thinks he can get it back and then some by tomorrow.”

“Gambler?”

Jamie makes a hum of agreement.

“He know I’m your brother?”

Jamie shakes his head.

Jordie smiles. “I’m feeling kind of gambly. Might just go see if I can find a card game.”

He takes five out of the cash box, and Jamie feels better, that Jordie is there to help him with this. 

Jordie goes and Jamie tends the shop. It’s an hour, maybe less, when Jordie comes back, shaking his head bemused.

“How’d you do?” Jamie asks.

“Left the table seven dollars richer,” Jordie answers and that’s a surprise. “He knew who I was—Lee Walker said my name as soon as I walked through the door, asked how the mercantile was doing with all the rain keeping the miners on their claims.”

Jamie snorts. He should have expected that.

Jordie shrugs. 

“Anyway. If he’s cheating, he’s too good at it for me to catch him. I got the feeling that everybody was winning a hand or two, and Tyler three or four. He was keeping them happy. Telling jokes and all. Buying a round. He should have your money by dinner time.”

Some muddy miners clomp in then, buying things they absolutely need first, before they head to the saloon and card tables and upstairs rooms and spend every flake of gold they’ve found. 

Jamie doesn’t think of the handsome gambler again, until Jordie starts making sounds about closing for the evening and Tyler hasn’t come by.

Jordie goes and Jamie stays, the sign on the door flipped to closed, but the door left propped open. He latches the shutters on the windows and leaves a single lamp burning. He said Tyler could have a second day. There’s no guarantee that he’ll come. 

Jamie straightens the shelves and contemplates projects they can work on, come winter. 

He inventories the stock they sold today and starts a list of items they need for the next shipment.

He’s stalling, as the streets outside get darker. He puts away his list and leans in to blow out the lantern, but there’s a soft tap on the door and he looks up instead. 

“You still open?” 

“For you? Sure.”

Tyler steps in and the room suddenly seems crisper, the moment burning into Jamie’s memory. He’ll remember for years, the way Tyler moves, his eyes on Jamie. Alert but confident.

Tyler pushes the door closed behind him and walks to the counter. Reaches into his vest pocket and pulls out a little stack of coins. Jamie doesn’t have to count to see the money’s all there. He pulls out the cash box, lifts the tray of money out and then Tyler’s possessions from the compartment underneath.

Tyler smiles. “Sure you don’t want to flip for it? Winner takes all.”

Jamie shakes his head. “Still not a gambler.”

Tyler starts putting the trinkets into his trouser pockets, everything but the pistol, which is too large to fit, wrapped as it is. 

“It was a pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Benn,” Tyler says, and offers his hand.

Jamie takes it, the air around them heavy and thick. Tyler’s hand is warm, his palm soft, the skin of a man who doesn’t do heavy work. 

Tyler’s fingertips linger on Jamie’s wrist as they pull away.

“I thought so,” Tyler says, soft, a small satisfied smile on his lips, another gamble won. 

“What?” Jamie asks, and Tyler takes off his hat, steps around the counter, the lantern light golden on his cheek.

_Oh,_ Jamie thinks. Everything seems so clear, and yet he still couldn’t put words to it if he had to. He’s dizzy suddenly, with how much he wants. 

Tyler reaches, cups his hand around the side of Jamie’s jaw, thumb near his cheekbone and fingers light on the nape of his neck. He moves slow but sure like Jamie is a skittish horse. 

Jamie’s heart pounds in his chest, but he’s not afraid. Nothing like afraid. He breaths in sharp when Tyler leans in, when Tyler’s chapped lips brush against his. 

Jamie raises his hands. Not sure where to put them. Not like he’s ever done this before. Never been touched with such sure purpose. He brings his palms to rest, one on Tyler’s upper arm and the other on his hip. Feels his warmth through the layers of clothing. 

Their eyes are open. Tyler, watchful, careful. Jamie because he can’t bear to miss this, to miss any part of what’s happening.

Tyler flicks Jamie’s lips with his tongue and Jamie parts them, breathes in Tyler’s breath. He can feel his own pulse, at temples and throat and groin. He takes a step back, off balance and shaky. The ladder to the upper floor is behind him, against his shoulder-blades, and Tyler in front of him, just as solid.

“Want…” Jamie whispers into Tyler’s mouth, but he doesn’t know what he wants. Doesn’t know what Tyler would be willing or able to give him. 

Tyler’s kisses stray from his mouth, soft at the corner of his lips then down the short hairs of his beard to his throat. Tipping Jamie’s head back and sucking lightly at the skin, he feels Tyler’s teeth, but there’s no pressure, no bite. Jamie is floating, his feet an inch off the floor, disconnected from everything but Tyler. His fingers grip Tyler, but he can’t tell how tight.

“…take care of you,” Tyler murmurs. His hands reach down, fumble with the buttons of Jamie’s trousers. 

Jamie grunts and nearly spends himself at the brush of Tyler’s fingers against his swollen shaft. 

Tyler moves his hand to Jamie’s hip. “Shh,” he whispers in Jamie’s ear. “Not yet. Not yet. Breathe.” Jamie stares at the underside of the loft and takes a breath, steels his resolve to last more than seconds.

Tyler goes still against him, his forehead pressed against Jamie’s, just enough space between their bodies that Jamie can feel the floor under his boots again, can feel the rungs of the ladder digging in against his back.

“Yeah?” Tyler asks. It shouldn’t make sense, but Jamie knows what he’s asking.

“Yeah,” he says back. 

Tyler’s smile is nothing sort of wicked. His eyes never leave Jamie’s as he sinks to his knees. 

Jamie stares down in disappointed confusion. He liked what they were doing, and he has no earthly idea what Tyler’s doing down there. Checking for disease? 

Tyler’s lips brush the head of his dick, a slow whisper of breath teasing at his skin. Jamie wants to jerk away out of politeness, wants to push in against the touch and warmth.

It’s. Obscene, filthy, something men only ask whores to do, and pay extra when they can find one who offers the service. He can’t. Shouldn’t…

And then Tyler’s mouth is around him, warm and wet and tight and he grabs onto the ladder behind him to keep from flying apart. 

“Oh damn,” Jamie pants, groans as Tyler sucks on it, as he lowers his head until Jamie is pushing at the back of his throat. 

As intense as it is, he thinks he could hold back, thinks he could make it last just a tiny bit longer, except Tyler’s eyes are still on him, bright and intense as a lightening strike. 

“Oh,” Jamie grunts out. “Oh,” and he’s coming, he’s spending himself in Tyler’s mouth. A wash of shame comes quick on the heels of the orgasm, even as Tyler hollows his cheeks and swallows it down. 

“Oh god,” Jamie gasps. “I’m sorry, I…”

Tyler pulls himself up, his touch light on Jamie’s hips. 

“Don’t be sorry. It was good. I like it.”

Tyler nudges in at Jamie’s jaw again, but doesn’t try to kiss him, and Jamie takes the moment to gather his wits, to tally up the way he’s feeling about it all. It’s not something he ever considered, though he knows other men have walked that road. He never thought it would be him, but with Tyler here, Tyler against him, it feels right. Sensible even though it’s a sin and a crime. 

He wants to do it again sometime, and Tyler’s not gotten anything out of this for himself yet. Jamie figures his chances are better if he can reciprocate, and truth to tell the thought of putting his hands on more of Tyler’s body is a sure draw, even if he’s not gonna be ready to go again any time soon.

“I want…tell me how to make it good for you…” 

Tyler pulls himself into Jamie, mouth on Jamie’s neck, chest and hips and thighs shifting against each other. It would have been good a few minutes ago, but Jamie’s soft and sensitive now and he winces, holds Tyler back from grinding him to pieces. 

Tyler makes an unhappy grumble but he turns in Jamie’s arms, puts his head back on Jamie’s shoulder and leans his whole weight against him. Jamie can look down and see Tyler opening his trousers, pulling his dick out.

“Gimme your hand,” Tyler says, a shade of urgency building in his voice. “Just do it. Do it like you’d do yourself.”

Jamie only hesitates for a second, stirring the idea of putting his hand on another man’s privates. It’s not how he planned to spend his evening, and he has to rearrange a lot of his assumptions about himself and the things he needs. 

Tyler pumps his hips, bumping Jamie’s hand and Jamie wraps his fingers around. It’s no warmer or softer than his own, but Jamie feels more aware of it when it’s Tyler’s. 

Tyler groans at Jamie’s first tentative stroke, goes lax against Jamie’s chest. Jamie holds him with his other hand, Tyler’s chest flat and solid with muscle under his palm and he digs the tips of his fingers in a little, feels how strong. 

Jamie gains confidence, gains speed. Slides his other hand down from Tyler’s chest, over the flat slab of his stomach, just above the cut of his pelvis. He can feel Tyler’s breath going erratic, can hear him panting and moaning. Close, Tyler is close and it stirs Jamie, awakens pride in being able to do this, to please someone in such a fundamental way. 

Tyler groans and reaches one hand up, grabs the back of Jamie’s neck and holds on. 

“Yes,” he gasps, ragged and throaty. “Jamie, Jamie, yes…” and then he’s coming, hips pistoning and then going still, every muscle rigid as he comes on the shop floor. 

Jamie mouths along Tyler’s neck and nuzzles the back of his ear, holding him up until he can be responsible for supporting himself. 

Neither of them hears the sound of boots on the boardwalk outside, but they both see the door open, Jordie silhouetted there in the vague glow of the street outside.


	5. Chapter 5

Jordie sits at the bar, his first shot of whiskey warming his stomach. He vaguely contemplates going upstairs with Miss Pearl, even though he’d been the day before. He feels restless, despite his dreams of the future having always been to settle, to stay. The longing for a woman’s warmth, the softness of sweet curves, it isn’t the source of his agitation, though he thinks she might soothe him for a while if he goes up.

The rumble of the big wheels of the cargo wagons out on the street catches the attention of the saloon’s patrons and a few wander out to see what all has come in. Jordie catches sight of Julie heading up the stairs and then back down again an improbably few minutes later, looking like a high-society lady from New York in a sea of green silk. 

A man comes in with the driver of the wagon. Older, tall, with blond hair and round-lensed spectacles on his angular face. Doc Gretzky, Jordie guesses by the way Julie greets him. 

Jamie should be here, instead of sulking over in the store or whatever it is he’s doing, so Jordie slips on by the incoming crowd, out the door and down the road.

The streets are quiet, most men having found a place to drink and gamble and whore the night away by now. The shop is still and dim but not dark. The lantern light still showing through the cracks in the shutters tells Jordie that Jamie is yet downstairs.

The door isn’t locked and Jordie pushes it open. It takes him a heartbeat to see them, Jamie and Mister Seguin, Seguin’s back against Jamie’s chest, and Jordie’s thought, his first thought is _Oh god he’s killing him,_. A memory overflows the reality in front of him, an image carved deep in Jordie’s nightmares. They’d been breaking up the Confederate supply lines. A river, a ferry, a nighttime raid. Jamie, grabbing the watchman from behind before he could sound the alarm. Jamie’s hand over his mouth, blade slicing his throat. Jamie hadn’t seen, that the boy was even younger than he was. Hadn’t seen the child’s terror before he’d spilled his life on the ground. 

Jordie had though, and his breath catches harsh in his throat. Seguin’s head snaps up, eyes wide, not dead, not dead oh thank god. Jamie startles, snapping up from where he’d been leaning, and Seguin stumbles forward a step.

Jamie’s mouth opens but no sound comes out.

Seguin steps to the side, steps where he can see them both, and then he does up the front of his trousers. His fingers are not as steady as they’d been on the deck of cards earlier.

Jordie should go. Should walk away and pretend he’d never been there. Pretend he hadn’t seen. 

Whatever startlement Seguin had felt, he smooths it over with an easy smile that’s bright as fool’s gold. His hands are quick as he grabs his hat off of the counter and steps back again. A muscle in his cheek twitches, the slightest faltering of his mask. 

Jamie looks down at the floor. 

Seguin glances over at him and then back at Jordie, and then past him to the door that Jordie’s standing in front of. 

“Gents,” Seguin says, tipping his hat, “It’s been quite an evening, but the cards are calling me back to the table.”

Jordie steps to the side, giving Seguin free passage out of the store, and his steps are brisk as he takes it, turning sideways so he never quite puts his back to them. 

It’s silent when Seguin has gone, when the door has closed behind him. 

“Jame?” Jordie asks, a knot of dread starting to twist in his guts. He replays the image he’d walked in on. Seguin leaning against Jamie. He turns it around in his head but can’t figure any way it was Jamie being forced into something he didn’t want. So Jamie must have wanted. 

“I’m sorry,” Jamie says to the floor, his voice hoarse, shamed, and Jordie doesn’t want that, has never wanted that. 

“Jamie,” Jordie says, trying to sort through the crush of emotions squeezing his chest. He finds that the most encompassing is _relief_, the sudden easing of guilt that had weighed his shoulders down until he forgot he was carrying it. “You were. You looked…” Happy isn’t quite the word. “Alive.”

Jamie shakes his head, muscles in his jaw working as he clenches his teeth. 

“I thought. I thought it was the war that took that from you,” Jordie confesses. “I thought it was my fault, leading you there so young. If I’d been less stupid. If I’d stayed home like I should have… You not finding any comfort with women. That you didn’t look to take a wife when we were in the city. I thought that was on me.”

“No,” Jamie says, and Jordie thinks again that he should have just turned around and left the second he saw what was going on, except Jamie would be feeling these same things and Mister Seguin a questionable port in this storm. 

“I. I think this was before. I tried…I wanted…but I always felt wrong. And after, I just. Didn’t have enough of me to fake it.”

============

Jamie glances up at Jordie, his stomach tied in knots. It had been so easy, with Tyler, in that moment. Desire and pleasure. 

“It’s…” Jamie searches for the word. Sin comes to mind, but of all the things he’s done, it won’t be this that earns him a spot in hell. 

“What’s stoppin’ you?” Jordie asks, like he means it, like it’s that simple. 

Jamie shakes his head, the words to describe his trepidation swirling forever out of his grasp.

His eyes land on the counter, on a pistol wrapped in oil-cloth.

“I should. This is his. I should take it to him.”

As much as Jamie had said so to get out of this conversation, Jordie seems pleased to let him go. 

“I’d expect Mister Seguin to be back at the tables, this time of night,” Jordie says.

Jamie picks up the gun, feels its cool weight in his hand. 

“Oh, and Doc Gretzky came in with the wagon train. That’s what I came in to tell you.” He shrugs, sheepish, like he wouldn’t have come in if he’d known.

Seeing how Gretzky came in on Jamie’s recommendation, it’d be rude to not go by and welcome him to town. Jordie pulls out his keys and Jamie puts on his hat and they lock up and head over.

Julie’s seeing that the good doctor is feeling appreciated in town when they get to the saloon, Jolene leaning in at his side, giggling and running her fingers through his hair. Jamie’ll get to him in a bit, when he’s a mite less occupied. 

Tyler—Tyler’s pretty busy too though, a full table around him, a pile of money and nuggets in the center. Red Molly is sitting on one of his knees, her head thrown back onto his shoulder as she laughs. He smirks, rubs a hand up the busk of her corset. Raises the bet with a handful of gold coins without looking at the cards in front of him. 

Jamie puts himself in Tyler’s line of sight. He’s not sure what he’s expecting, considering the way they were a few minutes ago. Tyler looking pleased to see him, maybe. He wouldn’t have been surprised by anger either. Looking back, his reaction when Jordie came in wasn’t exactly chivalrous. Wasn’t what Jordie would have done for one of the girls if it was Jamie walking on them in a moment of passion.

He’s not expecting Tyler to glance up, see him and not care. To murmur into Molly’s ear. She smiles and looks over at Jamie and he has a heart-stopping fear that Tyler just told her. How easy he was to seduce, how his hands had trembled touching another person like that for the first time.

She leaves Tyler’s lap and weaves through the crowd to Jamie’s side.

“That for him?” 

Jamie blinks and looks away from Tyler.

“Uh, yes ma’am.”

She takes the pistol from him, tucks it up somewhere under her skirt. 

“Doc’s here,” she says, an unsubtle dismissal. 

“Yeah,” he mumbles and tips his hat. She turns and swishes her way back to Tyler’s side, leans down and whispers in his ear when she gets there.

Tyler looks Jamie’s way for a flickering instant, looks at him like he’s nobody special at all.


	6. Chapter 6

Jamie isn’t sure how he leaves the saloon. Next thing he knows, Jordie stands in front of him, hands on his shoulders calling his name. It’s dark, and quiet, their presence silencing the night birds. They’re on the road, the glow of town about a quarter mile behind them.

“You okay now?” Jordie asks, his chest rising and falling like they’ve been fighting. Like he’s been holding Jamie back from walking out into the wilderness. Between the gorges, the rivers, wolves and bears, it’s not a sure thing he could have walked back.

Jamie swallows. Nods. Jordie steps back, rolls his shoulders to loosen them up. 

“I didn’t. Didn’t hit you, did I?”

Jordie shakes his head. “’Course not.”

Jamie takes a slow breath in and then lets it out.

Jordie turns away, away from town, leads the way with Jamie’s footsteps heavy behind him. Around the bend there’s a bluff of rock, not exactly smooth, but round enough it’s no misery to sit a while.

Jamie thinks Jordie’ll make him talk. Ask what happened to sweep the legs out from under him like that. 

He doesn’t. They sit, there in the dark. Sit long enough the nightjars start their calls, thrumming echoes that come from everywhere and nowhere.

They sit, until the ache of the rock on his backside and the chill on the back of his neck let Jamie know that his mind is fully connected to his body again. 

After a while Jordie sighs and Jamie figures the rock isn’t any softer for him so he stands up. He can’t quite bring himself to break the silence, so he nods towards town and Jordie joins him, shoulder brushing as they walk back into the light and through the noise to their own quiet place.

Jordie doesn’t ask, as Jamie strips his shirt off and washes his face and neck in the cold water of the small basin up in their room.

He doesn’t ask in the dark after the lantern is blown out, or in the hours after. Jamie stares at the underside of the roof, not thinking anything at all.

He doesn’t ask over coffee or during the day or that night or the next. 

Jamie guesses Jordie’s letting it go. Figures he should let it go too. Not every good thing has to last. Maybe Tyler never would have come to him again, even if Jordie hadn’t walked in. Hard to know what he’s lost when he never had the measure of what could have been. 

Jordie goes to the saloon and brings back Jamie’s meals and doesn’t ask why he’s not going himself. 

Jamie makes it through until the first of the month without talking about it, without thinking about it more than half the day. He’s always been over to get the payments from Miss Chu. Seems rude to leave her wondering where he is. He doesn’t know if anybody has asked Jordie about it, but Jordie didn’t say anything to him if they did. 

He didn’t take it on himself to pick up the cash either.

Jamie’s getting better at noticing when Jordie gives him a nudge.

He washes his face in the morning, smooths back his hair. Tidies up the edges of his beard with a straight razor. 

Julie is at the bar when he gets to the saloon, just a little past noon. Any earlier and the women would still be abed. This time of day they’re half-heartedly weaving between the men, smiling a little, leaning in and flirting but not trying too hard. 

The sharp sound of cards being shuffled catches Jamie’s attention and he looks over to that table before he can stop himself. Tyler, glancing his way out from under the brim of his hat. His face doesn’t change, but his eyes linger.

Jamie turns away, heads through the empty tables to join Julie. 

“Mister Benn,” she greets, a small smile on her lips.

“Miss Chu.”

“I wasn’t sure I’d see you today.” 

He’s not sure if she’s teasing him, but he nods. “I’m here.” 

She reaches under her skirt and brings out the pouch of coin and bills and passes it to his hand. It’s still warm from her skin, the intimacy of it making him flush. He tucks it into his coat. 

“There’s another matter,” she says before he can take his leave, leaning closer and dropping her tone. “It seems there’s a deviant in town. The girls are gossiping. I thought you should know.”

Jamie’s heart stutters in his chest, but no, they can’t mean him. Nobody knows except for Tyler. Unless Tyler’s been talking, been spinning tales or just telling the truth of what happened.

Jamie swallows. Tries to think why Julie would be telling him. “Deviant? Somebody hurt one of the girls?”

She hums, shakes her head. “Nothing like that. He puts on a good show, paying for their company and the privilege of having them on his arm. Never sleeps alone, but never does more than sleep either, despite some embarrassing attempts to convince him otherwise.”

Jamie frowns. “Why are you telling me this?”

The corners of her mouth curl up but she doesn’t show teeth. “Oh, I thought as the acting-sheriff of our god-fearing little town you’d want to know.”

God-fearing, right. The church still had a canvas roof, not enough in donations to put up wood shingles. If the Benns didn’t give the preacher half price on his personal supplies, the man would have starved by now.

“If this ‘deviant’ hurts one of the girls, if he starts being bad for business, you let me know then. Otherwise I trust you to take care of it.”

Julie sighs, another on the long list of people Jamie has disappointed. She looks over to Tyler’s table. To _Tyler_. “Just thought you’d like to know what he’s not doing with his evenings.”

Jamie swallows hard. Oh. The image pushes into his mind, Tyler alone with one of the girls, betwixt her knees and looking up at her like he looked at Jamie. It’s a lot easier to imagine than him taking a pretty girl to bed and not getting under her skirts, especially if she’s trying to put him there.

“Don’t see how that’s any business of mine,” he says, and tips his hat and turns to go, his back ramrod-straight and his neck stiff against the urge to turn and look at Tyler one last time.


	7. Chapter 7

It’s probably none of Jordie’s business, how Jamie and Mr. Seguin last left their acquaintance. Still, he feels bad for it, however unintentional his interruption had been. Jamie goes quiet a bit, and Jordie isn’t sure if anything he could do would help the situation so he stays away from Seguin too.

Then comes rent day for the hotel, and Jamie takes the nudge and goes to the saloon for the first time in weeks. Gets the money and gets out that first time, but after that he starts going regular again. Eating his meals there, stopping at the bar for a drink. Watching over the girls when things get rowdy. 

Jamie doesn’t talk to Seguin. Jordie sees him nod hello when their glances happen to catch. Sees Seguin’s lips twitch just a little like a smile he’s trying to keep tame.

Seguin’s morning ride takes him past the store now, and Jordie sees Jamie watching from the doorway most days. 

Jordie is not qualified for matters of the heart, but he needs to fix what parts of this are his doing. Let Seguin know if there were any less-than-friendly feelings, they weren’t on Jordie’s end of things seems a good place to start. 

So he goes to the saloon after the shop closes, goes and spends his money upstairs with Miss Molly and comes down again with ten still left over. There’s an open spot at Seguin’s table and Jordie waits for the hand to end, Seguin raking the coin and nuggets and somebody’s watch towards himself. 

It’s not a group Jordie would usually join. Earl Givens is at Seguin’s left, the kind of man who won’t believe the war is over until he’s in his grave, still wearing that damn gray kepi. Jenks on the other side is hard to listen to, his voice nasal and superior even though he’s just another hard-luck miner like the rest of them, hitting it big enough to brag about some days but never enough to take his fortune and go. A couple other men Jordie’s not spent the time with to remember their names fill out the round.

Still, he’s on a mission, so Jordie steps up to the chair, raises an eyebrow. Seguin lifts his chin, waves at the spot. “Mr Benn. Nice to see you at the table again.” 

They play. Jordie half-expects more of Seguin’s attention than he gets, but he spreads his jokes and smiles around the table as the evening goes on. Jordie relaxes but Earl Givens across the table is taking each loss harder than the last, huffing and blowing as he folds another hand, antes up on the next.

Jordie looks to the door, hoping for Jamie to come in. 

Jamie doesn’t.

“Maybe you should lay off, Earl,” Jenks says, flinches back as Earl bares his yellow teeth at the man.

“Maybe you should mind your own game and shut up about mine.”

Seguin meets Jordie’s eyes across the pot in the middle of the table. 

“I fold.” Seguin tosses his cards face down in front of him. 

The bet goes around the table again and Earl shoves the last of his money out there. 

Then Earl and Jordie and the guy on Jordie’s left all turn their cards. 

Jordie looks to the door for Jamie again as he gathers his winnings. 

Lily swans up to Tyler’s side, runs her fingertip under the edge of his vest in front.

“That’s it for me for the night, boys,” Seguin says with a grin and a tip of his hat.

Earl’s too fast for Jordie to see it, grabbing Seguin’s wrist and slamming his arm to the table. 

“You cheated! You must have.”

“Now Earl,” Jenks starts, sounding like a schoolmarm. 

Lily startles back, eyes darting around, looking for Miss Chu, but Seguin looks calm. 

“Cheated? How’d I do that?” Seguin asks, mild. “You wanna check my sleeves? Look behind you for a mirror?” 

Earl actually does glance over his shoulder and then turns back to Seguin with a frown. Seguin’s other hand slipped below the edge of the table when Earl was turned. Jordie’s seen Seguin’s pretty little gun. It’s gonna make a pretty little hole in Earl’s guts if something doesn’t break this up quick.

The other men are finding enough courage to get up from the table, but not enough to stick around. He wishes one was smart enough to go get Jamie, but nobody’s leaving the saloon.

Jordie leans forward and starts stacking his winnings, coins clinking like he doesn’t have a care in the world. “Can’t blame a man for noticing your eyebrow gets itchy when you’re bluffing, or you keep checking your cards when they’re good,” Jordie drawls. 

“What? You can’t say that.” Earl’s eyes are wide with outrage. 

Jordie summons up how Jamie looks when the quiet has him, when he looks at a man like they’re both already dead and the act of seeing it through will be a heavy task that he’s ready for. He picks the top couple of coins off of his stack and slides them over to Earl.

“You catch him cheating or you shut your mouth,” Jordie says. Earl sputters some more, but he’s let go of Seguin’s arm. “Now you take that and go somewhere else and buy yourself a drink.”

“You can’t do that!” Earl cries again, a hurt little kid raging at the unfairness of the world. 

He takes the money though, storms towards the door. 

Seguin watches until Earl is well and truly gone, and then he beckons Lily back over, takes her hand and looks up at her. Jordie can’t hear over the pounding of his own heart in his ears, but it’s plain to see he’s making sure she’s well, soothing her worries. 

“That’s my girl,” Seguin says, as Jordie remembers the trick of breathing. “Go on, I’ll be up soon.”

Jordie glances to Tyler’s cards. Tips his head towards them.

“What’d you have?” It should be rude to ask, but he’s pretty sure he knows already.

Tyler shrugs, a smile tugging at his lips. He takes the cards and comes around the table by Jordie. Flips the cards over like the finale to a magic trick. Maybe it is. Straight flush. 

“This should have been yours,” Jordie says, meaning the winnings. There’s not a fortune there, maybe twenty dollars. Enough to make Earl Givens want to start a fight at least. 

Seguin shrugs and waves his hand. 

“Cost of business. Glad you had the cards to back up the curl of your little finger.” 

“I am never playing with you again,” Jordie says, but he can’t bring himself to be mad. Or to mean it.

Seguin grins at him. “Seems to have worked out well for you so far.”

Then Seguin glances up, to the balcony at the top of the stairs. Jordie doesn’t have to look to know one of the girls is up there fluttering to him. 

“This really is it for me for the evening. Good luck if you play on tonight, Mr. Benn,” Seguin says with a tip of his hat. 

Jordie gives him a nod in return. “Evening, Mr. Seguin.”

Seguin gets up and goes, stops by the bar for a bottle and a pair of glasses and then heads for the stairs.


	8. Chapter 8

Spring turns to summer, the days stretching long but not bright enough to ever feel like noon, the sun low in the sky to the south. Morning lasts until nightfall, the twinkling of the stars catching Jamie by surprise.

A couple miners hit a big score, and a new wave of men pours into the territory, hoping to find their own fortunes. They don’t stay long in town, couple nights in a bed and then filter out to their claims in the hills. They leave money behind at the mercantile and the saloon. At Tyler’s poker table and with the girls upstairs. 

Jamie and Jordie and the other business owners talk over the state of the town. Figure there’s still a year guaranteed of good trade in this place. Another year at least of winding down, unless some other territory has a big find and the miners all leave overnight to follow the news.

Julie has men start work on a narrow balcony down the side of the hotel that faces the street, and the girls sit out there when the weather’s nice and wave to the men passing by, call them up to the rooms. She doesn’t ask Jamie to pay for it.

Jordie orders them glass panes for the windows of the store. The promise of catching a little sunlight in the winter, keeping some of the dust out in summer makes the price worthwhile. Tyler takes his horse out every morning (morning for saloon folk anyway—Jamie’s usually eating his second meal of the day around that time), and he slows to watch the work as Jamie and Jordie fit the palm-size pieces of glass into sectioned frames, the frames into the windows. 

It’s fiddly work, delicate. Jamie doesn’t like things that break, but he’s glad when it’s done, the shop looking more complete with the shuttered holes in the walls finally true windows.

He likes watching Tyler ride by, the sun on the soft chestnut of his hair. He has a good seat, tall and graceful in the saddle. A good hand on the reins. He has an ease about him Jamie can’t remember ever having, his eyes bright and on the road ahead of him.

They pin the star on Jamie in late July. Offer thirty dollars a month to go with it, gathered from the business owners. Jamie doesn’t want the job, but he wants someone else to do it even less. Someone else might do it worse, mishandle some of the more fiddly parts of the town. Jamie doesn’t like things that break, but he’d rather have the hotel in his hands than anybody else’s. 

The black water is still there in the back of his head, but it’s receded to the bottom of the well and Jamie stands on the dry wood of the boardwalk. 

===========

Tyler shuffles the cards, and Jamie watches from the bar. He catches himself staring, a sensation that’s becoming all too common on nights like this, with the noise of the saloon familiar around him. 

Tyler catches him too, glancing Jamie’s way from under the edge of his hat, a smile playing at his lips that could be from something someone at the table said, or from a thought in his own head, or that he likes Jamie watching him. 

A vision in sweet powder blue passes between them, Lily working the crowd, teasing and mingling, fluttering her fan in front of her face. She ends up behind Tyler, leans against his back and drapes her arms around his neck. He grins and tips his head back, kisses her cheek and says something soft.

Jamie turns back to the bar, pushes his glass over for another drink. It’s not that he’s bothered by the girls’ work, it’s just that Tyler makes it look too intimate, too affectionate. He’s not sure why Julie is letting it go on, if Lily is getting attached to the man. 

Lily’s skirts swish against Jamie’s pants legs as she leans against the bar next to him like she was summoned by his heavy thoughts.

“Sheriff,” she says, her voice soft and sweet. She brushes her fingertips over the front of his jacket, smoothing the lapels.

He resists the urge to correct her. He’s not wearing the star, but he’s wearing the weight of the title, the obligations it carries.

“Miss Lily.” He’s never heard her surname. 

“I think you should come upstairs with me,” she murmurs, leaning closer. He knows what they must look like. 

He shakes his head, trying to come up with words that won’t be an insult or give himself away. 

She raises her gaze to meet his, her eyes as pale blue as her dress. 

“Quiet some rumors, Mr. Benn. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

He takes a breath. Maybe he’s already exposed. His oddities noticed.

“I’ll see you taken care of. I promise.” Like he isn’t a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier. Like she could harm him in some way.

He glances over to Tyler’s table, looks to see if he’s noticing this, see what he thinks of it but some other man is in the seat.

“Yeah,” he breathes, and she smiles so pretty. Takes his hand and draws him away from the bar, through the crowd of men and up the stairs. 

He wonders what she’s planning to do with him, how they’ll spend the time, and then he tries to think of something else, anything else. 

She leads him to room three. Taps the door and then opens it.

Jamie freezes, reaches for the gun he’s not carrying. There’s no reason for anybody to be in the room she’s using. For just a moment, the sting of betrayal burns in his chest.

But then, but then the door swings open and Tyler is there, sitting on the edge of the bed, golden in the light of the bedside lantern. Lily drags Jamie forward, and Jamie allows it, his empty hand rubbing on his thigh to free himself of the phantom feel of his Colt’s grip. 

Lily pushes the door closed behind them and Tyler stands up. His usual bravado seems thin, nervousness closer to the surface than Jamie’s yet seen it, even when Jordie walked in on them. His hat is on a hook on the wall, his jacket folded over the foot-board of the bed. 

He looks like a thing Jamie could touch. 

“Is this alright?” Lily asks Jamie, and Jamie breathes through the surprise, through the uncertainty of the situation. 

“It is.” 

She smiles, and crosses to Tyler. She stands on her toes and he leans down and she kisses him on the cheek. He takes her hand, leading her to the window like it’s part of some fancy dance. She climbs out onto the balcony and disappears from sight. 

The room smells of women and sex, perfume and sweat. 

“Oh,” Jamie says as Tyler turns back to him. 

Tyler stands to his full height. He’s not a small man, but not as tall as Jamie either. They stand there, staring at each other for long seconds.

“I took a gamble,” Tyler says. “You tell me if I misplaced my bet.”

Jamie swallows. “No, you… Seems a win to me.” He takes a step forward as if drawn by marionette strings. It’s more than he could have hoped for. Alone with Tyler, in a room with a bed. He wants he wants he wants without having an image of what that would look like. What he and Tyler could do with each other. 

Tyler smiles, and it’s not the bold grin of victory. Something softer, less sure. He closes the last few steps, leans up and brushes his lips across Jamie’s, his eyes still open, watching. Jamie’s hat gets bumped off, falling with a dull clatter behind him. 

Jamie holds Tyler’s hips, fighting the urge to squeeze in, to grip with all his strength. 

He kisses back, awkward and eager but Tyler doesn’t seem to mind, the strength of his arms holding Jamie where he wants him, gentling the kiss. 

“We’ve got the room until morning,” Tyler murmurs, the words muffled against Jamie’s lips. “Julie says she’s not paying you for it though.”

The idea of so many people knowing this, this secret Jamie didn’t even know he was keeping until the brush of Tyler’s fingers against his wrist is chilling, but Tyler’s lips are warm. They stand together, touching. Kissing. Jamie learns the shape of Tyler’s shoulders, the strong lines of his chest. He pants, eyes fluttering closed and then open again. He doesn’t want to lose a moment of this. Wants to remember every detail that he can, this unexpected gift he’s been given. 

Tyler draws him step-by-step towards the bed, and when it comes up against the back of Tyler’s knees he puts his hands on Jamie’s chest, keeps him still while he bends and turns the lantern down low. The flame sinks as far as it can go without going out altogether. The starlit sky outside is brighter, but not by much, the night wrapped around them like a whisper.

Tyler slides the jacket off of Jamie’s shoulders, folds it and puts it somewhere. Maybe he just tosses it to the foot of the bed. Jamie can’t look away from him to see. He takes off Jamie’s vest and slides the suspenders off of his shoulders. 

Jamie’s hands drift. He’s not sure where they should be, where he’s allowed to touch. He wants to touch everywhere. Wants to put his mouth on the wonders of Tyler’s body. 

Tyler unfastens his own outerwear, and the first brush of fingertip against Tyler’s warm chest sends a spark down Jamie’s arm. He swallows hard and misses the hard edge of the ladder against his shoulder-blades. Something to lean against as his head reels. 

“Sit down,” Tyler says, quiet even with the sounds of merriment filtering up from downstairs. “Let me get your boots off.”

Jamie feels for the bed and Tyler helps him find it. He can see a little more this way. What light there is shines on Tyler’s face instead of silhouetting him against the window. 

Tyler kneels at his feet, pulls Jamie’s boot into his lap and unties the laces. Jamie’s breath catches. It’s so _intimate_. Nobody but family has ever touched him like this, cared for him. Tyler’s hand cups the back of Jamie’s calf, the other grabbing the boot by the heel and pulling it off. 

Tyler stands when he’s done with the boots. Slides his hands up Jamie’s legs. Jamie can see the shape of him in the dark, not nearly enough light to see the expression on his face. 

Tyler climbs up on the bed. Climbs up on _Jamie_,pushing him flat against the mattress, straddling his thighs, unbuttoning Jamie’s shirt. He leans down, ghosts his breath against Jamie’s jaw, tickling along the edge of his ear. 

Jamie has one brief moment of perfect alignment of body and mind. The room around him, the bed below and Tyler above. It feels so good. The warmth of the room and Tyler’s weight on his legs. 

It feels good, and then like the crack of thunder something happens. Maybe Tyler’s breath hitches or his weight shifts. Suddenly it’s wrong, everything wrong. Hot humid Georgia air suffocating him, a Reb above him. He knows it’s Tyler. Knows he’s still in the hotel. That he’s safe. 

His body wants to fight. Wants to live. Jamie struggles for breath, struggles to let his throat relax enough to speak.

“No,” he gasps. His hands become fists against the sheets. Eyes wide, trying to see, trying to see anything.“No, no, off, get off.”

Tyler goes off of him so fast he lands on his rump on the floor. Quiet, not a sound except for his body hitting the planking.

Jamie jerks upright, fumbles for the wick knob on the lantern. He doesn’t remember hitting Tyler, but his hands and feet are both tingling numb and maybe maybe, he doesn’t know…

Tyler doesn’t look hit, sprawled on the floor, legs akimbo, leaning back on his arms, eyes wide. He doesn’t look scared, quite, but wary. Silently staring up at Jamie. 

Jamie doesn’t know what he himself looks like, but it can’t be good. He sits heavily back onto the bed, puts his head in his hands, trying to look smaller. 

After a moment Tyler shifts on the floor. Gets his feet under himself and stands up. 

“I couldn’t see you,” Jamie says. It’s no excuse, not even much of an explanation. He tips his head up to look at Tyler, trying to read his face, trying to memorize every line of his features in case he never sees him like this again.

Tyler nods, jerky. “I shouldn’t have…too much, too fast. Last time, you were…like a candle. Flickering.”

He takes a slow step forward and Jamie’s neck will hurt if he keeps it bent like this too long, but he can’t look away from Tyler’s face.

“Should I go?” Tyler asks, measured. Jamie wishes people—Jordie, Tyler—would stop talking to him like that. Wishes he didn’t need the care they take with him.

Jamie shakes his head. If anybody should go it should be him. Right. He should go.

“Do you want me out?” he asks, and it’s a surprise when Tyler shakes his head.

Jamie searches Tyler’s face for pity and finds none. 

Tyler reaches out, slow, and runs the pad of his thumb down Jamie’s cheek. 

Jamie frowns, pulls away and raises his own hand, checking for tears, but his skin is dry. 

Tyler’s eyes go thoughtful. Calculating. “So the lantern stays lit, and you be the rider; I’ll be the pony?”

Jamie plays that over in his head. The room lit, Tyler under him. 

“There any way to do this side by side?”

“We can do that,” Tyler says. He leans down, presses a tender kiss to Jamie’s forehead, and then he draws away, circles the foot of the narrow bed to the other side. Jamie feels the mattress sink, and then move again. When he turns to look, Tyler is lying on his side, patiently waiting.

Jamie shifts around. Careful now, dark water swirling around his ankles, the footing below the surface uncertain. Any misstep will send him plunging into the depths. 

He puts his feet on the bed and slowly lays himself out, head on the pillow, staring up at the ceiling. 

“Are you still…” Tyler starts. Jamie sees him nod meaningfully out of the corner of his eye.

“I uh. Yeah.” He’s not sure how, not sure if it’s even acceptable. He wonders if Jordie ever felt like this, up here with the women. He winces at the place his thoughts take him and then focuses here, now, Tyler, instead.

Tyler scoots close and then closer still. Rests his head on Jamie’s shoulder and his hand on Jamie’s stomach, his touch moving just a little, petting Jamie through his shirt.

“Let me make you feel good?” he whispers, and Jamie wishes he was better at this. He’s not sure what Tyler’s getting out of it. Surely there must be other men like them here. Jamie cannot possibly be his best option.

“Please,” Jamie says back, just as quiet. “Yes, please.”


	9. Chapter 9

Tyler makes him feel good, his hand this time instead of his mouth. He keeps his face near Jamie’s, eyes open. There where Jamie can’t forget who he’s with, where he is. 

Jamie takes a long time after, his body tingling, his limbs heavy. His mind is quiet, not the muffled swaddling of the water, but something lighter. Better. 

Eventually Tyler stirs restless beside him, shifting a little against Jamie’s hip. Jamie turns to face him. 

“The thing you did last time,” Jamie starts, feels the color rising on his cheeks. “That something for an amateur to try?”

Tyler laughs, that way he has that it never feels like it’s _at_ Jamie. “You want to practice sucking cock on mine, Mr. Benn?” 

Tyler’s words are filthy, could be cruel out of another man’s mouth. But the gentle way he’s looking at Jamie, there’s no mistaking the way he’s making light of it, making it easy for Jamie to tease back.

“Seems as good as any, and it’s here and ready,” Jamie says. 

Tyler leans forward and pecks a gentle kiss to Jamie’s lower lip. Then he rolls onto his back and unfastens his trousers. Slithers them down his hips like a snake shedding its skin, leaving them around his knees. 

“Have yourself a ball,” he says, and his cock bobs in agreement where it’s swelled firm against his belly. 

Jamie licks his lips, some of his bravado slipping away. Tyler catches it, gentles his own grin.

“There’s not much you can do that won’t feel good. And I’d be happy with your hand if that’s what it comes down to.”

Jamie shakes his head. “No, I want to, but—” 

“It’s not a snake; it won’t bite.”

Jamie chokes on a laugh. This isn’t funny. Except with Tyler it is.

“Go ahead. Touch it if you want to. Take your time.”

He puts his arms behind his head to augment the pillow and looks for all the world like he’d wait on Jamie’s leisure now matter how long it took.

Jamie takes a breath. Okay. Touching it. He’s done that before and there were few surprises there. He reaches out a finger and it jumps again at the touch, and Tyler hisses in a breath. Not nearly as unaffected as he’s acting then. It’s reassuring to know.

Jamie scoots himself down the bed, his feet hanging off over the hard line of the foot-board. Eyes to eye, Tyler’s cock is a bit more. He touches again, looks up at the sound Tyler makes. 

The strangeness of it all, looking at things he’s never seen like this, touching a person in a new way, makes it easy to stay in his head, to see the things that are here and not those in the past. To touch Tyler and feel Tyler.

He sniffs, and Tyler doesn’t smell bad. Tastes with the tip of his tongue and the skin is a little salty, a little musky. The tang of alcohol and the mellow smokiness of cigars. 

Tyler’s breathing heavy by then and Jamie hates to keep him waiting so he puts his mouth on it, the skin so soft and thin over the hardness of the shaft below. Tyler arches and his hands come down from behind his head, his fingers grabbing a handful of sheets on either side of his body. 

Jamie looks up and sees him licking his lips, eyelashes fluttering as he watches what Jamie’s doing. 

Tyler had put Jamie’s cock all the way into his mouth, so he turns and does that. Feels his teeth brush skin and knows that isn’t good, even before Tyler hisses and tries to back away through the mattress.

“Sorry, sorry,” Jamie says. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Maybe just his hand would be better. 

“Easy,” Tyler says, “Hold your lips tight.” Reaches to touch Jamie’s shoulder, a light brush of his fingertips. 

Jamie nods, his face burning with embarrassment, that he had to be told something that seems so obvious now. He tries again, and Tyler moans, rolls his hips up slow, letting Jamie keep it as shallow as he needs it. 

“Yeah, yeah, Jamie, that’s good. So uh so good. Yeah, get it wet. You don’t have to take too much. Use your hand on the rest of it.” 

His voice is distracted, dreamy. Like Jamie’s giving him so much pleasure he has no strength of thought left over for words.

Jamie feels free to experiment, to use his tongue or the roof of his mouth. He’s not sure how long it takes, how Tyler can possibly be so patient with him. Tyler pets his hair, brushes his shoulders and keeps up a constant litany of moans and whispers. Jamie gets bolder and bolder, his hand slipping lower, reaching and brushing Tyler’s balls, cupping them with the same reverence he’d handle his own with. 

He’s not sure what he did right, but Tyler’s breath hitches and he scrambles for the collar of Jamie’s shirt. 

“I’m gonna—I’m gonna…” he gasps and Jamie pulls back, Tyler’s hand covering his as they stroke the last few times and Tyler spends, thick spurts falling against his stomach where his shirt’s open. 

Jamie strokes a few more times but Tyler squirms away from the touch and Jamie leaves it be. 

They lay there, breathing in the quiet of the room as the raucous night carried on around them—hoots and hollers from the saloon, the rhythmic banging of a bed on the other side of the wall. 

They stay, for a long time, sweat and less pleasant excretions drying upon their skin. Tyler stands, by and by, goes to the small table on the other side of the room. There’s a pitcher there, and a washbasin. He pours some water into the bowl and moistens a rag. Wipes himself on the way back to bed, folds the cloth to a clean side and then takes care of Jamie’s mess too. 

He’s quiet, his face turned serious, his thoughts folded inward. He puts the cloth back in the basin and returns to his spot on the bed. Stretches out and puts a hand on Jamie’s waist. 

“Will you stay the night.” It’s not quite a question. Like he already knows the answer Jamie will give and isn’t pleased with what’s coming.

And damn, what Jamie wouldn’t give to be able to tell him anything else. “I can’t. Jordie. If I don’t turn up, he’ll look for me until he finds me or until I find him.” He would, too, search the town and the road until Jamie turned up, even if that was noon the next day. 

Tyler lets out a short huff of air and rolls over with his back to Jamie. “Go on then. I won’t come out anytime soon. Nobody’ll know it was me you were with.”

Jamie’s not sure where it went wrong, if it was something he actually did or if it’s just the way things are. 

He fastens his pants and buttons his shirt, finds his jacket and vest at the foot of the bed. Pulls on his boots and laces them up. The silence of the room is heavy like fog. 

He’s not sure what to say. He’d like to do this again. Like to see Tyler even when neither of them’s exercising their pecker. 

Tyler doesn’t stir. Doesn’t speak again and doesn’t turn to look at Jamie, so Jamie picks his hat off the floor, brushes off the dust and goes.

Stepping into the smoke and light and noise of the saloon is like taking a blow after the soft dim quiet of the room. Too many people, too much sound all around. He pushes through the crowd, past the bar despite how much he’d appreciate a drink. 

He passes Lily in her pale blue satin. Her smile falters when she sees his face, twists into a mask of anger like he’s never seen on a pretty girl’s features before. She shoves past him, her small hands hard against his chest and he lets her. Watches over his shoulder as she patters up the stairs. 

Whatever is going on with Tyler, at least he won’t be alone. 

Jamie goes on his way, out the front door of the saloon, into the quieter night. Down the dark street to the store. There’s a lantern on in the loft, Jordie probably reading one of his dime novels. 

Jamie takes a breath, feels his shoulders ease some. 

He goes home.


	10. Chapter 10

The Staal brothers ride in as the preacher is ringing the Sunday bell. Come the first brush of autumn, men will be crowding the doors of the church before the first peel of the bell, trying to establish themselves as god-fearing, upstanding citizens who shouldn’t be left in the snow to freeze.

Few head that way now, men who haven’t come to peace with who they are or the things they’ve done. Men who still hope for absolution from on high. 

The Staal brothers are tall, pale-eyed, lanky men. They’d been through a few times before Jamie wore the badge, showing their wanted posters around. The men they’d taken back to civilization were trouble in town, their loss felt for only a day if even that long. 

Someone must have brought news of Jamie’s hiring out of Bright Star, because they ride straight to the mercantile without stopping at any of the saloons or the hotel.

“Sheriff,” the one on the left says, tipping his hat. The other slides off of his horse, flips up the flap of the saddle bag and rummages through.

One’s Eric and the other is Marc, sworn deputies of the territory, but Jamie wouldn’t bet a thin dime on which is which at any given time. 

Jamie leans his shoulder against the pole that holds up the part of the roof that overhangs the boardwalk. 

“Gentlemen,” he says.

“My brother and I are looking for some fugitives,” the spokesman says. The other brings up the wanted posters. 

It’s not like when Jamie was young, the slave-catchers looking for runaways. These men are accused of more than the crime of stealing themselves. Still, it feels like betrayal to nod, even if the man’s a horse thief. “That one, Cove. I’ve seen him. He works a claim on Crooked Creek.” He thumbs through the sheets. “McCullen. You passed him coming in, most likely.”

There’s a camp on the edge of town, tattered tents and scraps of board. Men who’ve lost everything here and either don’t have the strength for the walk back south or can’t bring themselves to admit their golden dreams have turned to ash. The Staals might be saving his life to bring him back, even if it’s to a prison cell. 

Jamie keeps his sigh internal. “I’ll come along and make sure nobody else gets hurt when you take them in.”

\---------------

Tyler rides past the shop three times the next morning. Jamie sweeps the dust out the front door and off of the boardwalk and doesn’t stare at him until he’s out of sight, despite how he aches to see Tyler. Aches for them to speak or touch. 

Lily and Molly come in around noon, the first time they’ve set foot inside the store. There’s nothing the mercantile offers that a lady could want, and the hotel provides for their needs. The Benn Brothers are not in the business of fine things, and there aren’t enough women in town to make it worthwhile to carry ribbons or perfumes or pretty fabrics. 

They watch Jamie as they peruse the sifting pans and bags of flour. Not quite angrily, but they’re definitely on a mission. 

Jamie just has no idea what their goal is. If he should give them a message to take back to Tyler or apologize for whatever it was he did wrong.

He goes up, nervous, and asks if he can help them find anything, but gets a turned shoulder from Molly, a disdainful sniff from Lily.

The other customers in the store buy what they need and leave and Lily comes up to the little counter where the money box is locked. She puts her hands on the flat of it and looks up at him. The last time Jamie was so scared of something so small there’d been a rattlesnake in his bedroll.

Jordie, the big coward, says “I’ll go see if Dillon needs anything added to the next shipment,” takes his hat and leaves. 

Lily doesn’t watch him go. Stares Jamie down instead.

“If you’re going to use him like that,” she says, her voice strained by emotion. Exactly which emotion, Jamie isn’t sure. “Then you should pay him. A lot. It isn’t right, whatever it is you did that left him like that. It isn’t right at all.”

She doesn’t give him a chance to get his words together, to find a way to tell her things he couldn’t even tell Tyler or Jordie. She turns and grabs Molly’s hand and together they swan out of the store like a pair of princesses. 

Jamie heaves a sigh and watches them go. Well, heck. 

It’s a bit later that Jordie comes back, poking his head in the door, eyebrow raised and looking carefully around for the girls. When he sees the coast is clear, he comes the rest of the way in. 

“Thanks for sticking around,” Jamie says, his full appreciation for Jordie’s courage naked in his voice.

“If you’re on the wrong side of Julie’s girls, you’re on your own,” Jordie says. 

The sound of boots on the boardwalk makes them both look up. Tyler stands there in the open doorway, every hair in place, his back straight as a poker. The sun shimmers on the silver threads in his brocade vest, on the rings on his fingers and the edge of a coin held tight under his thumb.

“Aw hell,” Jordie says, and runs away again, flipping the sign on the door to closed and pushing it shut behind Tyler’s back as he goes. Tyler takes another step in so the door doesn’t hit him in the rump.

Jamie stands, feeling like a man facing a firing squad.

Tyler takes a breath and then loses all his starch, shoulder slumping, curling in on himself like he’s nursing a wound he’s trying to hide.

“Molly told me what Lily said to you.” His eyes are on Jamie’s hands, not his face. 

“I didn’t ask her to do that. I don’t want your damn money. I won’t make the same mistake again. I shouldn’t have—shouldn’t have asked what I did.”

Of all the things Tyler could have done, could have said, coming in like a man defeated, making a near-apology, Jamie never would have anticipated it. 

“You—wait. Shouldn’t have asked what?” 

Tyler huffs like Jamie is being deliberately obtuse. “Asked you to stay the night. Are you happy now? That I’ve said it plain?” 

Jamie shakes his head. Wants to touch Tyler, to comfort him somehow, but Tyler is likely to leave or punch him for it and Jamie isn’t sure he could take either. 

Tyler squares his shoulders again and turns to go. 

“It wasn’t a mistake!” Jamie blurts, and Tyler turns back with a frown. 

“What did you say?” he asks, even though Jamie was damn clear.

“I said it wasn’t a mistake. Asking me to stay. I wanted to. Would have. But. But Jordie would have spent the night looking for me.

“I wanted to stay,” Jamie says, heart pounding. “If. If I had another chance, and enough notice to tell Jordie that I’d be out all night. I’d stay.”

He wants to say Jordie is just overprotective, but it would be a lie. Wants to warn Tyler that sometimes he’s not right, that his head goes dark and he can’t find his way back alone, but he doesn’t know the words.

Tyler’s smile fights against the wariness on his face, twitching at his lips, pulling his eyebrows out of their frown and then faltering again.

“I want there to be another chance,” Tyler says like he half-expects Jamie to shoot him for saying so. That glimmer of a smile gets smudged away by nerves.

Jamie nods back like a child’s wooden toy. Head bobbing up and down and he can’t make it stop until it’s gone on too long. 

“I do too.”

“Come by the hotel then,” Tyler says. Soft. A challenge. “Ask for room three. Might take a bit to set it up but I’ll get up there with you somehow.”

“Ask who?” Jamie can’t imagine saying that to Lily. The girl seems more likely to set him on fire than help him right now.

Tyler shakes his head. “I’ll talk to them. Lily and Molly and Julie. Nobody who doesn’t know already. We’ll figure it out.”

Jamie opens and closes his hands, wanting to touch, but Tyler is so far away. Better not to, anyway, with nothing but the sparkling panes of glass between them and the men passing by on the boardwalks. 

“Okay,” Jamie says. “Yeah, okay. I’ll see you. Soon, I guess.”

Tyler nods, once, turns on his heel and goes out the door. 

Jamie stands there until Jordie comes back. 

===========

Jordie doesn’t ask what went on, and Jamie doesn’t offer, but it seems clear enough to Jordie that he doesn’t feel the need to poke at the situation. Jamie made a flying mess of things with Tyler somehow. The girls came to straighten him out. Tyler came to take Jamie’s apology and must have gotten it because he leaves with a spring in his step. 

Jordie turns the sign back to “open” and finishes out the day. Jamie is quiet, but mind seems well-tacked to body, his movements focused, easy. 

It’s not until after Jordie has locked the shutters and Jamie has taken the money box up to the loft and put it away safe that anything happens to give Jordie cause for worry. Jamie, taking his gun belt out from the drawer where he keeps it close at hand in case of sheriff’s business. 

“You expecting trouble with your dinner?” Jordie asks. 

Jamie shrugs. “Was a point yesterday that I wished for it but didn’t have it.”

Jordie’s frown deepens. “Thought you were with Tyler last night.” 

“Yeah.” Jamie buckles the belt, fastens the tin star to the front of the holster. “I had a second where I thought Lily was leading me to a trap instead of…”

Jordie snorts as Jamie trails off. “A trap for your cock?” 

Jordie snickers and Jamie goes red and it’s so much like before the war that Jordie’s chest aches. To see Jamie embarrassed but smiling. The hint of pride at who he’s managed to share a bed with. 

“C’mon,” Jordie says. “I’ll buy the first round.”

In the coming days, he’ll be glad of the little scare Jamie had had that night. Glad Jamie has a weapon on him when trouble comes back in town.


	11. Chapter 11

Jamie closes his eyes and rests his cheek on the flat plane of Tyler’s stomach. Tyler’s breathing isn’t louder than the crowd downstairs, but it fills Jamie’s consciousness. He can hear the bawdy song that’s broken out. Doc Gretzky brought his fiddle and the men are stomping along in time, the sounds muffled by the wood flooring between them and Jamie. He can hear it, but it doesn’t matter.

Tyler is the only thing of it that seems real, the rise and fall of his chest and Tyler slowly carding his fingers through Jamie’s hair are all that he wants to feel. 

He shouldn’t have waited so long for this, an entire week until Molly had come to him to see why he hadn’t asked to go to room three yet. It had just never seemed mannerly, to name the time and place and expect Tyler to be there. It was so much easier to go up at someone else’s asking, in someone else’s time. 

And now, now, they are sweaty and warm against each other. Tyler’s shirt is off and Jamie’s open down the front. The feel of bare skin on skin sticky and not quite pleasant, though Jamie can’t seem to find the will to move off. 

“Been a long time since I shared a bed with anybody,” he murmurs into the echoes of music. “During the war a couple times, Jordie and me when it was too cold for our bedding.” Not since then though. Not in the boarding houses in New York or on the trail to Bright Star. Not even that first year when they struggled to keep the little pot-bellied stove fed enough to warm the store and still woke up with ice crackling on the outer layer of their blankets. 

Tyler sighs. His fingers go still and then start up again, gentle scratches against Jamie’s scalp. 

“You don’t have to stay,” he says into the dimness, the steady glow of the lantern the only light. “It’s early enough I can get one of the girls to do it.”

Jamie shakes his head but doesn’t look up. “I want to. I’m just. I don’t know if I’ll be any good at it.”

“The trick is to not let go,” Tyler says, so soft Jamie thinks maybe he’s talking to himself more than Jamie. “If you let go, it’s a surprise when you touch again. Stay close and don’t let go.”

The bed is narrow enough that falling apart in the night isn’t a problem. They sleep, entwined despite the warmth of the night. Jamie wakes half a dozen times, confused but not afraid. 

If he dreams, he doesn’t remember.

=============

The room is quiet, the store below is empty and locked up. Jordie breathes alone in the dark. Jamie’s a man grown, he reminds himself. It doesn’t make it any easier to be here when Jamie is there, when Jamie is elsewhere. 

He turns it over in his head, looks at all the angles. It’s not Mr. Seguin that bothers him about all this. Anybody that can get Jamie out of himself for long enough to enjoy a moment has his support. Jordie likes the man. Thinks they’d be friends even if he wasn’t bringing that particular smile to Jamie’s face. If his shy loitering near the store is any kind of clue, he’s not looking to do Jamie any harm. 

No, Jordie thinks it’s just the distance. Not knowing if Jamie is waking up fighting right this minute. Not knowing how Mr. Seguin will take it. If he’ll guess how to gentle Jamie down or if Jamie’ll react bad to a voice and a touch that isn’t Jordie’s. 

Jordie lies awake in the quiet and the dark and hopes Jamie doesn’t start keeping saloon hours. 

=======

Jamie wakes for the last time with the sun shining dim through the windows. Morning has broken, but not by much, and the force of habit is pushing at him to rise and start his daily ablutions. 

He resists, shifts to let feeling back into the arm that someone else is currently lying on. Tyler takes a sharp breath, grabs tighter where his arm had been resting across Jamie’s ribs. Jamie holds in place and Tyler sighs, still not awake, and nuzzles in against Jamie’s shoulder. 

Jamie gathers the moment to himself, his eyes tracing every detail—Tyler’s eyelashes, soft against his cheeks. The dark of his beard, the curl of his hair, knocked loose from their exertions. The swell of his shoulder, firm and well-muscled. 

Jamie is a man that likes a map to set his travels by, even if circumstances might separate him from that trail. He likes to know what’s over the next hill before he passes the crest.

He watches Tyler sleep, the slow rise and fall of his chest, a twitch of his brow as he’s perplexed by some dream. 

Tyler won’t stay the winter. Mining towns shrink when the cold comes, when the ground’s too hard to pick open and the streams too frozen to pan in. No more wealth comes in after then, and most folk try to live off of what they’ve accumulated over the warm months, merchants squeezing every drop from the miners who still require their services. Jamie and Jordie will do alright. Get in one last load that’s heavy on provisions and light on equipment and have goods to sell through the winter. 

Prices will fall at the cat houses and rise at the saloons as the whiskey runs low. Men will come into town and rent any warm corner for the season, filling the stable and sleeping on the floor of the church. 

There will be no money to be wasted at the gambling tables, most of the merchants too frugal to toss much away there, the miners clutching their last gold flake. 

Jamie thinks, at best, Tyler will go down to Cheyenne. Mid-October at the latest, to get there before the first blizzards. Maybe, maybe he’ll come back with the spring, if nothing better crops up, if nowhere else finds gold or silver. Men like Tyler are the first to go, unattached to people or property. Following the lure of fools and their money.

Summer will be the season of Tyler, Jamie thinks, and after, when winter comes and the camp town goes still and quiet, his life will return to how it was.

There’s a comfort in knowing when this strangeness will end, this glorious ripple washing over the face of his life. 

=========

Mr. Seguin working the table is a thing to behold, Jordie thinks. Charming and easy. Quick hands and the flash of his smile. 

Molly leans her back against Jordie’s chest, the pale swoop of her shoulder just calling out for his hand to caress. 

She hums and looks sideways up at him. “That the way your compass is pointing?” she asks, like she wouldn’t mind if it was. 

Jordie shakes his head and leans in to smell her perfume. “You know I’ve only got eyes for you.”

He’s not looking, but he feels her freeze like a hare trying to decide if it’s been seen by the wolf yet. He hears the gasp of fear and the saloon drops quiet and cold like four inches of snow have fallen while Jordie was caught up in the curve of Molly’s neck. 

Earl Givens stands before them, and it takes Jordie a stuttering beat of his heart to see the pistol in Earl’s hand, the angry set of his jaw.

“You ruined me, Mr. Benn. You turned my luck and told my tells. I sold my claim last week and today the buyer hits nuggets.” 

Jordie stands straighter and slowly pulls Molly around behind him. Wouldn’t it be irony that after his time in the war, some dumb Reb shoots him over a flapadoodle like this. 

“Hey Earl.” Mr. Seguin’s voice isn’t loud but it fills the room. Draws Earl’s gaze and the barrel of his gun. Seguin is on his feet, just out of Jordie’s reach at his side. 

Behind Jordie, Molly scurries away. Just as well; at this range a bullet might go clean through him.

“You wanna get shot too? I’ll get to you,” Earl answers and flicks his attention back to Jordie.

“I’d rather not,” Mr. Seguin says like they’re discussing what kind of weather he’d choose. “I’m just wondering if you really want to be the man that shot Jamie Benn’s brother in cold blood.”

“I ain’t scared a him,” Earl says, working his jaw like he’s grinding his fear between his teeth. “I ain’t scared a him and I’d tell him to his face.”

There’s a shift to Mr. Seguin’s body, his focus turning targets, a flicker of relief going over his face. “Well here’s your chance,” he says and nods to the door.

It’s the best and biggest bluff Jordie’s seen in his life, so real he turns to look too. Expects Jamie to be standing there framed in the doorway with such certainty that he’s surprised when it isn’t so.

Earl Givens twists around, already cringing at the idea of Jamie standing there behind him. Mr. Seguin moves, snatching up a shot glass from the nearest table and hurling it into Givens’ face. The glass is too heavy to break, but it makes a dull thud as it hits the corner of his eyebrow. Blood and whiskey splash across Givens’ face, and he howls with pain and surprise.

It’s flashy, what with the blood at all, but not much of a blow. Jamie would already be ignoring it. Givens is no Jamie though. For Givens, the hit is enough. Enough of a distraction for Jordie to step in, to grab the pistol and point it at the ceiling. The gun goes off and Jordie punches Givens with his own hand, the hard metal knocking him back. 

“You ruined me!” Givens cries out, falling backwards and dragging Jordie down with him. Jordie jerks the gun from him and gives him a punch for good measure. Givens goes down sobbing, drunk and beaten. 

Jordie stands up. He doesn’t have the cold in him like Jamie does, but it’d be too easy to keep hitting Givens until the soul took leave of his flesh. The war was not so long ago that Givens’ accoutrements of allegiance to the South don’t mark him as a deadly enemy should Jordie forget himself for a moment. 

Seguin gives him a hand up and presses a drink into his other hand. It burns going down, hard-edged cheap liquor. The kind of sting that reminds a man that he’s still living.

Givens stays where he is, curled up on the floor, and Jordie steps back from him. He looks over to Seguin, not sure what level of gratitude is appropriate when it was Seguin’s game of poker that got him into this situation. 

Like he can hear Jordie’s thoughts, Seguin shrugs, half apology, half camaraderie. His gaze flicks over Jordie’s shoulder at the door, his smile brightening.

Jordie looks behind him because far as he knows, only Jamie puts that particular look on Seguin’s face. It only makes sense, Jamie running to the saloon at the sound of the shot.

Jordie looks to the door and there’s no Jamie. Not even somebody Seguin could have mistaken for him. 

Seguin snorts and bumps Jordie’s shoulder as he steps around him to the bar. 

“I’ll warn the circus clowns that you’re after their jobs,” Jordie grumbles. 

Seguin buys his next drink and with it his forgiveness.


	12. Chapter 12

Jamie heads for the sound of the shot, and the closer he gets to the saloon, the quieter the world is, the rushing of blood in his ears the only sound he can hear. Men and horses crowd the narrow road, mouths moving, hooves splashing in the mud but no sound makes it to Jamie’s senses. Too much that he holds important is at the source of the pistol shot, Tyler and Julie and sometimes Jordie. 

The sight of men leisurely leaving the same place Jamie is rushing to, heads shaking at some fool antic and not with the shock of folk that just saw a man killed, takes some of the cold terror from his chest. Jamie’s steps slow and he’s breathing normal by the time he gets to the saloon’s door.

His eyes first find the familiar shape of Jordie’s back, and Tyler right beside him, turned toward the door. Tyler grins and nudges Jordie’s shoulder and Jamie heads for them. 

Earl Givens is sitting on the floor a few feet away from Jordie’s boots, drunk and bleeding, mumbling to himself and whimpering. 

“Mr. Benn,” Tyler says.

“You’re more fool than I if you think I’m falling for that again,” Jordie says, his back still to the room. 

“Falling for what?” Jamie asks. 

A giggle comes from Tyler’s throat that Jamie definitely wants to hear again.

Jordie hisses a curse and droops his head towards the bar. 

“Last time, I promise,” Tyler says.

“What the heck is going on here?” Jamie is feeling more left out by the second.

Tyler shrugs. “I might have saved your brother’s life. That’s all.”

“Saved my life, like he’s near sober enough to hit what he’s aiming for.”

Jamie looks down at Mr. Givens again. He looks well-wrecked and not a threat to anybody but the floor he’s dripping blood into. No injury bleeds like a head wound.

“Pretend I’m the sheriff,” the sheriff says. “Start at the beginning and tell me the whole thing. In order.”

============

Mr. Givens is allowed the comfort of the saloon floor to sleep on, tucked up in a corner. Jamie or Jordie keep an eye on him as night comes in and the crowds begin to thin out. Eventually, Jordie heads back to the store and his bed, clapping a hand on Jamie’s shoulder as he goes. 

Jamie stays at his out of the way table, one eye on Givens, but the rest of him watching the room, turning over the sequence of events in his head. Plotting out a way to have a solid end to this, with as little blood spilled as possible.

It’s nigh on midnight by the time Tyler’s table starts to wind down, one last round of drinks on him as he bids the night’s marks farewell. Tyler leaves them drowning their losses in cheap liquor and sidles up to Jamie’s table. 

“This seat taken?” 

It reminds Jamie of the way the girls used to come up on him, before it was known that his inclinations ran in a different direction than their delicate charms. 

Jamie pushes the chair out for Tyler to take. He sits heavily, tired. Even for saloon folk the hour is late. He leans back, feet sprawled out under the table, one hand on the surface. 

The last of the customers are kicked out of the upstairs rooms, one by one. The late-night barkeep wipes the glasses and stacks them for the next day’s business.

Givens’ snoring is interrupted by a gagging snort and then resumes again.

Jamie wants nothing more than to take Tyler upstairs, to peel his clothes off, to re-acquaint his lips with the smoothness of Tyler’s pale skin. 

The dim lantern light flickers off of the silver coin dancing across Tyler’s knuckles, and the smile on his face says that he knows the path Jamie’s thoughts are taking. That he wouldn’t mind seeing ideas made flesh. 

The situation with Givens takes precedent over Jamie spilling seed in a whorehouse bed. He’s come to a solution. Not a perfect one. Still good odds that Givens ends up dead by his own stupidity, but it’s a fair chance. As much as he deserves after pulling a gun on Jamie’s brother.

There aren’t many people Jamie’s felt grateful to. Jordie, but Jordie knows already, how much he’s done and how much it’s meant to Jamie. 

“Thank you.” The words come out rough, stilted. “For stepping in for Jordie. Sounds like you kept it from getting as ugly as it could have.”

The dollar coin comes to a stop, held on edge between two of Tyler’s fingers. Neither heads nor tails. 

Tyler shrugs. 

“He’d have handled it.” 

“It matters that he didn’t have to.”

Tyler closes his eyes, tips his head back like he’s basking in the sunshine that is still six hours away. 

“You coming up?” Tyler asks, barely more than a whisper. 

Jamie blows out a long breath through his nose. 

“I want to,” he says, more honest than he intended. “Givens though, I have to make sure he doesn’t start more trouble before morning.”

Tyler makes a grunt of agreement. Jamie searches his face but he doesn’t look angry, doesn’t seem disappointed.

Upstairs, a door opens and closes again. Tyler yawns and stretches and climbs to his feet. 

“Good night, Mr. Benn,” he says, soft and warm and Jamie curses Earl Givens again for this inconvenience. 

“Sleep well, Mr. Seguin,” Jamie answers. 

Tyler’s hand comes down on Jamie’s shoulder as he passes, warm and heavy as a promise. 

Jamie closes his eyes against the sharp pang of longing as Tyler climbs the creaking staircase, heading for arms that aren’t Jamie’s.

===================

Jamie lets Givens sleep until dawn, and then he prods him awake with his boot. Dodges as Givens spills the bile left in his stomach. 

“Up. Now.” 

Givens is still half-drunk, but has the brains to stand. He follows along, meek enough, as Jamie brings him back to the store. 

“It’s just me,” Jamie calls up to Jordie as he comes in, hears a thump and grumble.

He picks a sturdy canvas sack and starts packing. A week’s worth of beans, a small pot to cook them in, a canteen, flint and steel. The bare necessities for a man to hope to survive the walk south to Cheyenne. 

He shoves it at Givens and he takes it, eyes wide and puke still on his chin.

Dillon at the livery is awake with the horses, feeding hay and grain and Jamie rents two for the day.

They’re an hour out of town when Givens finds his voice. 

“Where. Where we headed?”

“You’re going south,” Jamie answers. He doesn’t glance behind his mount at Givens, but he’s aware of him with every other sense, the hair on the back of his neck warning of an enemy at his back. Listening to the plodding steps of his horse’s hooves. “I’ll ride with you for most of the day and then take the horses back. It’s a fair start. You come back and I’ll put a hole in you.”

Givens doesn’t ask any more questions after that. Doesn’t talk at all as Jamie sees him far enough down the path that he’s less likely to try his luck coming back to Bright Star on foot. 

Jamie watches Givens trudging south along the wagon trail until he disappears around a wooded bend in the road.

And then he rides home, to all the things that matter.

There will come a day when he runs into a problem he can’t solve by intimidation or exile. This is not that day.


	13. Chapter 13

Jamie looks half-asleep on his feet, stumbling into the shop just before sundown. He’s been up a day and a night and all the next day and it shows. 

He manages to get across the sales floor to the ladder to the loft without knocking down any customers or goods, grunts once at Jordie and climbs up to sleep.

Jordie thinks he’ll close up as soon as he can get everyone out that doesn’t live here, but just as he’s heading for the door, Mr. Seguin’s shiny boots cross the threshold. 

The shadow of uncertainty reminds Jordie of those early days, Seguin staring into the shop as he rode past on his horse. Lingering by the door watching Jamie work. 

“Is he hurt?” Mr. Seguin asks. “I had Ezra watching for him to come in. He said Mr. Benn was looking ‘A mite peaked.’”

Jordie takes a breath and weighs his options. “He seemed okay. Tired.” 

Seguin nods. Fidgets with a silver coin. 

“Want me to see if he’s accepting gentlemen callers?”

The blush that spreads across Seguin’s cheeks is as out of place as boots on a rooster, but it pleases Jordie to see it. He figures Seguin is a man beyond embarrassment. Unashamed of anything except showing too much of his honest self. 

“No, don’t wake him. I’ll take you at your word that he’s well.”

Seguin steps backwards towards the door, and Jordie doesn’t know, hasn’t heard the words from Jamie’s mouth that he’d want to get woke up just to ease Seguin’s worries.

“I’ll let him know you came calling,” Jordie promises. 

Seguin straightens the hat on his head. “I’ll be at the saloon if he wants to come up. Tonight or in the morning is fine.”

“I’ll tell him.”

The door swings closed as Seguin goes back into the night and Jordie turns the sign and locks up, turns the lantern down and brushes some dirt off of the counter. 

Jordie heads up the ladder when he’s cared for the store. The lantern is turned down low, Jamie’s boots askew where he dropped them on the way to his cot. The man himself is sprawled out on top of the blankets, face down and snoring.

It’s a long day that’s spent worrying, and Jordie is tired. He strips his clothes and washes his face at the basin and climbs into his own narrow bed. 

Sleep comes easy, the sound of Jamie breathing a comfort in the dark.

=============

Jamie sleeps himself out as the first thin tendrils of light work their way between the wood shingles of the roof above him. He replays the day before, checking for issues he needs to attend to immediately. He can’t think of anything missed, anything incomplete. If Givens should return, it’ll be at least another day for him to walk the path he and Jamie rode on horseback. 

With no emergencies, he takes his time with his morning ablutions. Washes his face and tidies the edges of his short beard with the razor he and Jordie share. He looks at himself in the small disk of mirror. He looks tired, but presentable enough to go down and open the store.

“Mrf.”

Jordie rolls over, forehead twitching as puts in the effort to open his eyes. 

“You gon’ to the saloon?”

“Not yet. They won’t have breakfast this early.”

“Mmm,” Jordie agrees. “No. Wait.” He props himself up on one elbow.

“You had a gentleman caller last night.”

Jamie makes a manly try but can’t stop the smile on his lips. 

“Mr. Seguin?”

“Yeah. Told him I’d tell you he came by. Was worried about you. Heard you came in ragged. Said he’d be at the saloon and for you to come up night or morning.”

“Alright. Go back to sleep.”

Jordie must have been waiting for that because he collapses back onto his bed and pulls the light blanket up over his shoulder.

Jamie goes down the ladder into the darkened store, his mind busy considering the options. 

Tyler worried about him. It seems an odd thing, a misplaced concern. That he’d be important enough for Tyler to walk away from the tables and come down to the shop. He can’t fathom what he’s done to merit such attention. It makes his chest feel tight, wrapped in warmth, but like a burden as well. The number of people who would mourn his passing is doubled, twice the reason to take care, to be cautious. To keep his head above water lest he drown all three of them. 

The handle of the broom is a familiar weight in his hands, every curve of the hand-carved wood imprinted into his palms. He opens the door and sweeps out the store, steps outside and sweeps the boardwalk in front of it as well. 

Tyler said to come to the saloon, night or morning.

Jamie puts the broom away and gathers his hat and his key. Locks up the store and walks through the early-dawn half-light towards the saloon. Off of the main stretch of road, he sees one of the old widow women sweeping her own porch. The laundry is already running, fire bright as they heat water. Dillon’s stable doors are open, and Jamie hears him humming inside.

The saloon isn’t open this time of day, but it’s not exactly closed either. The liquor will all be squirreled away in a storage room under lock and key, and there’s not much else worth stealing. For all of Ruff’s fancy intentions of a genteel oasis in the wilderness, the chairs and tables he brought with him only lasted a few months-- fragile, pretty things that didn’t stand up to the hard use they got in a mining town. 

It’s near dark inside the saloon, the downstairs shutters closed, the lanterns blown out and put away with the liquor. 

Jamie steps inside, and the part of him that kept him alive through the years of the war warns him that he’s not alone. He goes still, trying to see into the dark.

“Hey, I think they’re still closed,” a voice, _Tyler’s voice_ comes from the deeper shadows at the top of the stairs. 

The sound of it shouldn’t make Jamie’s lips try to bend into a smile.

“Didn’t come for a drink,” he says. 

“Jamie. Oh. You came.”

He’s not quite sure if Tyler’s pleased or disappointed, his tone hard to read without a face to see.

Tyler hasn’t seemed to mind when Jamie clarifies before, so he asks. “Want me to come up?” 

A dull thud comes from one of the other rooms, something thrown at the door.

“Some of us are trying to sleep here!” 

“Sorry, Molly,” Tyler calls but he doesn’t sound particularly apologetic. 

“Come up,” he faux-whispers down to Jamie. 

Jamie starts up the stairs, hand on the railing. He hears footsteps ahead of him and then a rectangle of light appears as Tyler opens a doorway into a room with a window, letting in the morning sun.

Jamie follows him, drawn step by step down the open balcony towards his door.

A smile twitches at the corners of Tyler’s mouth. “You came.” He looks more like the bedraggled rider Jamie’d first met than the smooth gambler at the tables. His shirt is half-tucked and his hair rumpled. 

“You didn’t stand there at the top of the stair all night, waiting for me,” Jamie says, though looking at Tyler’s disheveled countenance, he’s not entirely sure. 

Tyler closes the door behind him. His touch is light as he takes Jamie’s coat. 

“You caught me on the way to Lily’s room.”

Jamie turns in Tyler’s arms, frowns and brushes a thumb over the apple of his cheek. 

“Thought this was her room.”

Tyler rests his face in Jamie’s palm. 

“I wanted to be alone, so you could come up if you wanted to. Kept having dreams though.”

Jamie leads him the three steps to the bed. He’s moving on instinct, feeling his way over unsteady ground. He lays back and tugs Tyler’s hand, more an invitation than demand, and Tyler follows him down, tucks into Jamie’s chest in a way that makes Jamie feel bigger than he is, stronger. 

Tyler is quiet for a long while, and then he murmurs “Kept dreamin’ you were dead. Even knowing you were back in town. Hate sleepin’ alone.”

Jamie shuffles around to get them more comfortable. “Sleep now, then,” he says, and Tyler gives a little puzzled frown but he puts his head back down. Closes his eyes. 

It’s not that Jamie’s tired, exactly. The quiet of the saloon, so often riotous, casts a calm over the room though, and he’d lost sleep and worked hard enough riding Givens out of town. It’s easy to close his eyes, to cover Tyler’s hand gripped on Jamie’s shirt with his own. To fall into the slow rhythm of Tyler’s breath.

“I had a sister,” Tyler says. The room is too bright to pretend they can’t see each other, but Tyler says the words into Jamie’s collar-bone and Jamie stares up at the ceiling. 

“She. We were just little. Papa was a watch-maker, and we had a little home above the shop. The two of us shared a bed like puppies in a kennel.”

No words are going to make this better, make it easier, so Jamie keeps quiet, lets his fingers trail over Tyler’s shoulder in a slow back and forth.

“There was a bad round of scarlet fever that year. She woke up with speckles. Fevers. I don’t know how I didn’t get it or why. But. Papa sent for the doctor. Mama was scared I would get sick too and they laid me a pallet in the clock-shop and made me sleep there. First time in my life I’d slept alone.”

Jamie wants to say he doesn’t have to finish, doesn’t have to relive this terrible moment in his life. 

Tyler’s voice goes hoarse. “They kept me away from the her, and I didn’t see her again until she was brought down, all wrapped up for the undertaker to take.”

Tyler sighs, and some of the tension bleeds out of his shoulders. 

“I don’t like sleeping alone,” he murmurs, soft, and then he rolls over, tucks his back firm against Jamie’s side and goes quiet.

Jamie lies awake thinking. He’ll talk to Jordie. For as long as Tyler’s in town, Jamie will try to do this for him, this simple thing that’s all he’s asked for. 

==============

Jamie isn’t sure when he falls asleep, the long lazy morning with Tyler in his arms blurs in and out of wakefulness. He falls asleep to the sound of the women talking as they wash out the condoms for tonight’s use and he wakes up to Tyler easing out from under his arm, tucking it gently back down against his ribs. Tyler shifts around on the bed but his weight doesn’t leave it. 

It’s at least noon, judging by the relative brightness when Jamie gets his eyes open.

Tyler is sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. 

Jamie isn’t sure if it’s allowed, but he reaches out, touches Tyler’s spine just above the waistband of his pants. 

Tyler startles but doesn’t go so far as to come off the bed. He turns to Jamie, the smile on his lips bright and happy and utterly utterly false. 

“And I thought I was the shiftless one,” he teases but Jamie doesn’t smile back. 

Tyler’s grin falters and fades and he turns away again.

“Forget I said all that, earlier. I wasn’t in my right mind. That’s not the kinda thing you come upstairs for.”

_But it is,_ Jamie wants to protest. That glimpse of Tyler’s life, Tyler willingly sharing any part of himself, it’s more intimate than the secrets of his body. More precious. 

He’s not sure how to say so, without overstepping the line, blurred as it is. 

He licks his lips, takes a breath.

“I was fourteen when I killed a man,” he says, putting words to an event he’s never spoken of. “He would have killed Jordie instead, if I hadn’t. That man fell and it was like me that got shot. I was so cold, like I was bleeding out.”

Tyler looks back again, his frown more puzzlement than any kind of anger. 

Jamie tips his head, lays his arm back down for a pillow and Tyler crawls back into the bed, rests there against Jamie’s shoulder. 

Words come, in short rushes and long halting struggles. It seems a conversation meant for late nights and lots of liquor, not early afternoon, cold sober and listening to the sounds of the saloon waking up. 

Neither time nor place are fitting for this conversation, but they suffice.


	14. Chapter 14

Jordie is in the saloon, the store locked up safe, his lunch in front of him, when Jamie comes out of room three and down the stairs. 

Jordie loses sight of him for a moment in the midday crowd. Men are taking their meals and starting their drink both, and the place won’t settle down again until well after nightfall.

He takes in Jamie’s expression when Jamie comes through the crowd, puzzling out the unique shape of it. Despite the pensive set of his lips, there’s a lightness to his steps. He has an ease through the shoulders and across his brow that Jordie hadn’t seen much of before Mr. Seguin came to town. 

“Enjoy your time upstairs?” Jordie teases. 

Jamie raises his hand to signal the barkeep that he’s eating too and then joins Jordie at his table.

He gives Jordie’s question due consideration. Jordie is used to waiting on Jamie to find words, if he can get them out at all, and he’s in no rush. He pokes his gravy-covered slab of meat. Buffalo, he thinks, but could be cow or horse. The deer and elk have pretty much cleared out for a day’s hunt in every direction around the camp.

“Wasn’t a joy,” Jamie says at last. Jordie takes a bite. Jamie thinks on it some more. “It was work, but good work. Like back when we were putting the roof on the shop. Satisfying when it’s done.”

Jordie raises an eyebrow. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard copulation described quite like that.”

Jamie’s cheek twitches, a smile threatening. He doesn’t look like a man left less than satisfied.

“We didn’t. Not today. He just. He doesn’t sleep well alone. So we talked some, and then we slept, and then we talked some more.”

Jordie sops his bread through the gravy and stuffs a bite in his mouth. Half a dozen odd thoughts bounce around in his head. Worry that Jamie’s getting too attached. Happiness that his brother is talking to someone, anyone. Wondering what it means that Mr. Seguin wasn’t in a rush to do more than sleeping this time, if the excitement is wearing off. He hopes Jamie copes if Seguin moves on to novel companionship. 

Jamie goes to the bar to get his plate of food and comes back.

“You gonna be keeping him company then?” Jordie finally settles on. 

“If we can work it with opening the store and all. I don’t want to leave you with more on your shoulders because I’m over here. You’re already catching up my slack with the work I’m doing for the town.”

Jordie grunts his acknowledgment. “What do you think of hiring a shop-boy? Ezra will need a place to be, come winter. It’d help to have another set of eyes and hands while you’re out sheriff-ing or running your hotel.”

Jamie nods, thinking it over. “I’ll get the widow-women to make him a new shirt and pants. I don’t think we have any in stock that’ll fit him, runt that he is.”

The door to room six opens and Mr. Seguin steps out, hair slicked back and every stitch of clothing sharp-pressed. He gets himself a cup of coffee and orders a lunch and then glances around, smiles like he’s surprised and pleased to notice Jamie and Jordie there. 

Still, he doesn’t approach until Jordie waves him over. “Would you join us, Mr. Seguin?”

Seguin runs his fingers over his hair, like he’s not sure if he’s presentable. “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Benn.” 

He joins them at their table, shares the meal and sees them on their way.

If Jordie was worried about Mr. Seguin losing interest, it’s dispelled by the way he glances at Jamie whenever he thinks nobody’s watching him.

=========

“Pullin’ teeth’s my job. You cain’t just come to town and put me out like that!” John Storenson shakes his pliers and Jamie has to step in and push him back from Doc Gretzky again. 

“His jaw was broken in three places. You’re in no manner qualified to provide that kind of care,” Gretzky says. 

Wilson Williams watches the show from Gretzky’s table. His jaw is wired shut and his eyes glassy from the amount of laudanum he’s been given.

“How much is it to pull a tooth?” Jamie asks. 

“Two dollars,” Storenson says, narrowing his eyes like it might be a trap. 

“How much did you get for patching Williams up, jaw and teeth and all?” 

“Twelve and two bits.”

“Sounds like more than a ten dollar job,” Jamie says, and they both listen. Finally.

“Give Storenson a dollar. He didn’t do the work, but he can count it lost wages on your agreement that pulling teeth is his job.”

“I offered him that half an hour ago and he wouldn’t take it.”

Jamie looks over at Storenson. “He’ll take it now.” It’s not a question.

Storenson holds out his hand and Gretzky pays the man. Jamie walks him back to his shop, Storenson grumbling and kicking up dust the whole way. 

The wind is coming from the north, and Jamie pulls the collar of his jacket up against it.

The light is bad inside the barber shop, dark spots on the floor all around the grubby chair. Jamie thinks if he ever has tooth trouble he’ll sneak into Gretzky’s instead. 

He’s just glad Jordie doesn’t mind cutting his hair and that his own hand is steady with the razor. He’s pretty sure he wouldn’t take well to having this man behind him with a blade.

==========

Jamie is in the saloon three down from the hotel, making sure a dispute stays settled when the men find him, slick hair and fine clothes but brushed with the dust and wear of a long ride. They’re Jamie’s age, maybe a year or two younger. Young enough not to have gone to the war if the war hadn’t come to them. 

“We hear you’re sheriff of this town,” the taller one says. “We need your help finding a man.”

Jamie looks them up and down. They don’t hold themselves like bounty hunters. Too soft for this wild territory. Jamie stares until they fidget.

“I’m um, Thomas Holston, and this is my brother, John. We’ve come all the way from Boston, looking for the man who disgraced our sister, two years back. He promised to marry her and then left her pregnant at the altar. She wants us to find him. Tell him she forgives him for the shame he’s brought her. She wants him to know his son is a fine strong boy and she loves him still. If he’s ready to come home and be husband and father, she’ll take him.”

They seem earnest, these city boys, but Jamie isn’t a gambling man. Doesn’t believe in leaving things to chance. Better if he is there when they find the man they’re looking for, make sure that tempers don’t bring anybody to poor decision-making. 

John brings a locket out of his pocket, a delicate thing like a lady might wear. 

The photographs inside are barely larger than Jamie’s thumbnail, and the light in the saloon is poor. On one side is an infant, round-cheeked and sleeping. On the other looks to be a man, the image so small it’s difficult to tell features beyond his high sharp cheekbones and the hard line of his jaw.

“Can you help us?” Thomas asks. “He might be using a different name, but his own is Seguin. Tyler Seguin. He’s a gambler. Poker, usually.”

Jamie looks into the locket, his face blank even as his heart kicks in his chest. 

“Yeah, I might have seen him. There’s usually a game down at the Swan, up that way at the far end of the street. I’d start looking for him there.”

The men look at each other, eyes bright with excitement. 

John tips his hat and Thomas nods. 

“Thank you, sheriff. You’ve been a big help.”

Jamie returns the locket. Figures he’ll let them get out of sight and then go find Tyler, let him know he’s being hunted and see what he wants to do about it. 

The brothers leave, and Jamie is set to count to ten and head the other way. 

He’s at four when there’s a crash at the bar behind him, the ruckus he’d come to settle catching flame from the embers. Marcus Watts throws a chair at the barkeep and the kerosene lantern from the bar shatters on the floor and the fire becomes more than a metaphor. 

“Dang it!” The whole town could burn. Men rush out and Jamie shoulders his way back in. Grabs a coat someone left on the back of their chair and beats the flames out. 

“That man tried to burn my whole dang place down! You gotta arrest him, sheriff!”

Jamie hates being told what to do, but he wouldn’t put it past Watts to see the easy destruction he almost caused and come back to try again later. More is risked than Jamie’s job if he doesn’t head into the night and chase Watts down— it’s his store and the hotel, Jordie and Julie Chu, all the people who might get killed if the town goes up in smoke.

It takes him the better part of an hour to find Watts and take him in hand. The hotel has a store-room that could be used for a cell, and Jamie drags Watts there by the scruff of his neck.

A sense of urgency is burning in his belly. A minute’s delay before he could tell Tyler of the men hunting for him would have been too long. Nearly-an-hour is too long by far.


	15. Chapter 15

Lily comes up to Jamie as he leaves Watts to sleep off his drunkenness. There’s a frown between her delicate eyebrows. 

“Is everything well?” Jamie asks. 

“Have you seen Tyler?”

That burn in his stomach goes cold.

“He’s not here?”

“He was. He said he was going to the privy and didn’t come back. I thought perhaps he ran into you on the walk and you went back to the store together.”

“How long’s it been?”

“Almost an hour.”

Jamie takes a breath. “I’ll go find him,” he says, and his voice sounds hollow, like it’s coming up from the bottom of a well.

He leaves Lily and walks the path to the privy, comes back the long way around the bath house. A pair of riders gallop past, heading for the road out of town.

He doesn’t find Tyler, but he sees Ezra, sends him to go fetch Jordie.

It seems sensible to go back to the hotel, to make sure Tyler hasn’t come back and all Jamie’s traipsing around in the dark for nothing. 

Tyler hasn’t come back.

Jordie meets Jamie at the door.

“Ezra came and woke me. What’s happening? You smell like smoke.”

Jamie shakes his head. That’s not important right now.

“There were men in town, looking for Tyler, and now I can’t find him.”

It sounds foolish, put that way. Tyler’s a man grown and proven able to take care of himself. 

Jordie’s jaw works for a moment and then he stands straight. Sends a piercing whistle across the air of the saloon. Folk stop talking; the piano in the corner drops a few notes and falls silent.

“Mr. Seguin has gone missing,” Jordie announces. “We fear there may have been foul play. I’m offering fifty dollars to whoever locates him.”

The moment of quiet stretches a few more seconds, and then chairs scrape back from tables, glasses thunk down empty on the bar. A prize like that and every man in the place heads for the door. It is a ridiculous reward, but if it finds Tyler and eases Jamie’s worries it’ll be worth every cent. 

The night is lit with lanterns and torches, more men joining the hunt as word spreads. Jamie heads away from the light, skirting around the edge of town, the barren stretch that’s been stripped of trees for lumber and firewood, eaten clean of grass by the camp’s livestock. The recent rain has turned the earth in between the stumps to mud.

It takes a bit for Jamie’s eyes to adjust, to make sense of the starlit ground. The world is blue in the starlight, shades of gray. He can hear Jordie near, closer to the lights of town and behind Jamie’s line of sight. He’s taking word from the other searchers, sending them off again. Jamie’s hands feel light, missing the weight of his rifle. 

There’s a heap on the ground ahead, at the furthest range of Jamie’s vision, a mound like a crumpled bedroll, like an abandoned saddle. Jamie knows better than most what a body looks like when it falls. He starts running towards it. Running even as his mind begs for it not to be what his heart knows it is.

“Jordie!” he shouts. The ground under him shakes with the pounding hooves of a cavalry charge and he stumbles. A thousand rifles fire all around, the sounds of their shots popping together like bacon in a pan. Jamie runs, runs and falls to his knees at Tyler’s side. 

They must have found him, those brothers who were looking for him. Found him and dragged him out here, away from anybody who might have heard or seen.

Jamie throws himself to the ground, scared to move a man injured when there’s a doctor here, a doctor coming. The muddy water below Tyler’s lips ripples with his breath, takes the dark trickles of blood that flow from Tyler’s nose and mouth and a cut along his eyebrow. His face is black with it in the dim light.

“Jordie!” Jamie screams. His chest burns with the smell of gunpowder. He can’t hear himself for the boom of cannon-fire. He curves himself over Tyler, protecting him with his body. The Rebs. They’re gonna find him here, find Tyler. They need to move, need to get Tyler back behind their lines. 

“Jame.” 

Tyler’s whisper cuts through the sounds of war. The screams of gut-shot horses and the sound of boys crying for their mothers go silent along with the shouts of the men Jordie is calling over. Tyler’s whisper becomes his whole world. 

“Tyler,” Jamie gasps. God, they’ve beaten him nearly to death, the eye that’s not in the mud swollen shut, the hand he tries to raise mangled and broken. Jamie slips his palm beneath Tyler’s cheek and keeps his mouth and nose above the water. Tyler’s head goes heavy like it’s been taking everything he has to keep from drowning.

“Jame. They took m’ luck. Took it.”

Men are running around. Yelling. Jordie is there, gripping Jamie’s shoulder. Someone brings a torch and Tyler’s injuries turn from shadow to lurid color, the red brighter than any hue has a right to be. Half of what Jamie had taken for mud isn’t mud.

“Here!” Jordie shouts to somebody, and then Doc Gretzky is there, on his knees in the muck, feeling along Tyler’s body.

Tyler makes a broken sound, as close to a scream as he can make, as injured as he is.

“Get that stretcher over here,” Gretzky orders and men come up. 

It’s not a stretcher that they get down by Tyler’s body. Two feet wide and six feet long and made of pine so fresh cut Jamie can smell the sap. 

Gretzky guides them moving Tyler onto the coffin lid while Jordie pries Jamie’s hands from Tyler’s vest. Jamie knows the doc needs to take him. He doesn’t fight but he can’t make himself let go without Jordie’s strength working his fingers loose.

They take Tyler, and Jamie can’t make his legs work, can’t make sense of the words Jordie is saying. 

Between one blink and the next Jordie has gone from being at his back to in front of him, arms around Jamie, holding Jamie’s face to Jordie’s chest. Jamie kicks against the black water, claws his way up through the darkness. 

“Jamie, Jamie, don’t do this. He’s alive, he’s alive, you can’t. You can’t do this. He needs you. I need you.”

Jamie draws in breath, a high wheeze through his tight throat, and Jordie jerks back so he can look him in the eye.

“You with me?” Jordie asks. Jamie feels half-deaf from the roar of the battlefield. 

“I’m.” He’s not sure what he is. 

They took Tyler’s luck, the black-hearted bastards. As trophy or final insult, they took Tyler’s cut-edged coin.

“I need to go,” Jamie says, his voice hoarse. They can’t have gotten far on the road, not in the dark. Not nearly so far that a man of Jamie’s skill can’t catch them. The thought of going to Tyler instead, of seeing him torn open and bleeding on the doc’s table is like getting stabbed with a broken bottle. 

“He needs you,” Jordie says. Jamie isn’t sure when he stood up, if it was before or after Jordie did.

“They took his luck,” Jamie says. “He’ll. He’ll be stronger with it than without.” He steps back and Jordie follows him.

“Jamie, what are you going to do?” 

Jamie pulls the star off of his chest, puts it in Jordie’s hand. He’s already running strategy in his mind, where to commandeer resources—Dillon will be asleep this time of night, if the ruckus hasn’t woken him, but even if he’s not up, he’ll get up for Jamie, rent him a horse. His pistol is already on his hip, rifle and his best knife up in the attic at the store. 

He won’t need anything else.

“You want him to wake up alone?” Jordie asks.

Jamie shakes his head. “He won’t be alone. You’ll be there. A face he knows when he wakes. Someone to tell him I’m coming back with his luck.” He doesn’t say that Jordie will slow him down. They both know it already. Jordie’s probably counting on it to give Jamie time to cool off.

Jamie doesn’t need to cool off. His veins are filled with snow-melt, his heart frozen hard and numb.

“Jamie,” Jordie starts. Sees that it would take more than words to stop him. His jaw works as he searches for reason. “If you kill them, there’ll be a bounty on you. You’re no good to anybody spending the rest of your life running from the law.”

Jamie nods. He’s not sure he can stop once he starts. Not sure he can leave them breathing, knowing Tyler might not be when he gets back. 

“Damn it, Jamie,” Jordie says, his voice tight. “Don’t you make me a liar. I’m telling Seguin you’ll be back before noon. You see that you are.”

He grabs Jamie’s arms above the elbow, and Jamie mirrors the pose. They hold each other, heads bowed in something that feels like prayer. 

Then Jamie lifts his head and takes a lung-full of air. After so long at peace, war has returned to him.


	16. Chapter 16

Jamie goes, slipping into the dark like the war was still on, like any man here might try to stop him. 

Jordie watches him go and then turns towards the lights of town, trudging through the mud that suddenly seems so heavy. 

The sounds of camp rise as he gets closer. Men outside gossiping, crowded around the door to Doc Gretzky’s practice. Jordie pushes through them and into the small shop.

Seguin is laid out on Gretzky’s table, head tipped back and choking as Gretzky eases a tincture of opium down his throat. 

Gretzky looks up as Jordie comes in. “Wash up there,” he orders, nodding to the steaming basin by the door. Jordie looks down at himself, the mud from Jamie’s hands on his own. 

He strips off his jacket and outer shirt, rinses the soil from his skin. 

Gretzky opens a small case and pulls out a small wire mesh with cloth beneath it and affixes it over Seguin’s mouth and nose, counts out careful drops of ether from a bottle to soak into the fabric, and Seguin goes even more still.

The door behind Jordie opens and he turns. He doesn’t recognize the woman there for a moment, her pale curls drawn back underneath a kerchief, her plain-spun dress sorrel brown instead of the usual bright colors. 

“Where would I be the most use?” Lily asks, and Gretzky waves her over. 

“Here, help me strip him.” 

She’s quick but sure with the scissors, cutting along the seam lines so the cloth might be saved. Jordie returns to Gretzky’s side and looks down at his brother’s love. 

It’s bad. His nose broken so cruelly that the bone has cut through the skin. His right arm broken, the hand too. From collar to knees he’s all bruises, like they took turns kicking when one would tire. Most on the right side and back, like he curled up against the blows.

The doc feels over Seguin’s belly, pressing in and looking thoughtful but not dismayed.

Jordie helps Lily lift Mr. Seguin’s limbs as she undresses him, trying not to jar his injuries too much. 

Gretzky listens to his chest with an ear-horn, frowns at whatever sound it transmits. 

“Ribs are broken,” Gretzky mutters. 

“Ankle too,” Lily says as she cuts the laces of Mr. Seguin’s boot and carefully works it off of his foot. The flop of it turns Jordie’s stomach. Gretzky measures out another portion of opium and doses Mr. Seguin with it.

They work. Long into the night and into the next morning, binding the ribs and splinting the ankle, making what sense Gretzky can of the bones in his hand. “He might lose hand or foot or both still,” Gretzky warns. Jordie’s seen enough in the war to know the threat of gangrene. Gretzky uses a mix of plaster and cloth to align Mr. Seguin’s nose, stitches the cuts above and below his eye and wraps them with a poultice. 

Then they cover him with warm blankets except for where they lay wet cloths to cool his skin, and then it’s just a wait for the opium to wear off. Gretzky takes to his own bed, tells them to wake him if Mr. Seguin begins to stir.

Lily washes her hands and then takes the stool. 

It’s too quiet, and Jordie searches for a start to conversation.

“Miss Chu didn’t need you tonight?” 

The look Lily sends him chills his bones.

“Nobody’s working tonight,” Lily says. “Not with Tyler lying here like this.”

The entire operation, shut down. Jordie can’t imagine what it’s costing in lost business. 

“Thank you for coming,” he tries. 

She frowns, but not at Jordie, so he’ll take that as an improvement. He’d always thought of her as little more than a child, a living example of the frivolity of the fairer sex. 

“He’s a better brother to most of us than our own blood kin,” she says, her voice soft. “A kind word, a gentle touch that wants no more than to offer comfort and receive it in turn. He always pays, even when he isn’t taking more than he’s giving.”

She takes a breath, her gaze settling somewhere in the middle distance. “The men that did this. Has Jamie gone to kill them?”

Jordie gazes down at the core of his brother’s world. Figures Jamie could have done worse for his first love. Could have found the arms of a man seeking to take advantage of Jamie’s position in town, or one who took less care of the hearts of those around him.

“I don’t think he set out to,” Jordie says. “Might end up that way before it’s done, though.” Jordie’s never fallen in love of the romantic sort. He’s not sure how the fear of losing that love might affect a man, and even more how it would affect a man like Jamie, perched as he is on the precipice of darkness. 

“I hope he does,” she says, quiet. “I hope they hurt.”

Seguin’s good hand twitches, fingers rising off of the table and then curling into a fist. His breathing changes. 

“I’ll go tell the doctor,” Lily says. Jordie steps close in her place, up to the side of the table. 

Mr. Seguin’s eyes open, or one of them at least. His pupil is huge from the opium, and his gaze passes Jordie twice before settling on his face. 

“Jame,” Seguin says, his voice wrecked and raw. He chokes, coughing, unable to draw a full breath for the wraps around his ribs. His splinted hand flails and Jordie stops him from hitting himself in the face with it. 

“Roll him,” Doc Gretzky says from behind him, and Jordie helps Seguin to turn on his side. He stops choking, draws an uneasy breath. Lies panting and insensible under Jordie’s hand. 

Gretzky moves around, listening to Seguin’s lungs again, checking beneath the poultices and splints. 

“Let’s move him to the cot before the opium wears off completely. His next tincture will have to be of milder concentration.”

Gretzky slides a canvas sheet behind Seguin’s back, and Jordie lays him back upon it. With Jordie at his head and Lily and the doctor taking a side of the sheet at his feet, they lift him and move him to the cot. 

Seguin gasps and his good eye flies open as they raise him, pain or surprise or both, Jordie can’t tell. He blinks when they set him down again. Looks lost and young and hurt. 

“Jame,” Seguin says again. Coughs and gets out a clearer “Jamie.”

Lily pushes a chair over and Jordie sits where Seguin can see him. She takes her own spot above his head, gently combing the flaked blood from his hair with her fingers. 

“He’s gone on an errand. He gave his promise to be back to you by noon.”

Seguin licks his lips, and Lily reaches for the pitcher and a slip of cloth. Moistens it and drips a thin trickle of water into his mouth. Seguin drinks for a bit and then turns his head. Tries to reach his hand up to his face again, but Jordie stops him before he can do more damage with the splint. 

Seguin is recovered enough to figure the use of his other hand, to reach for his face with trembling fingers. 

It’s Lily that stops him this time. Holds his big hand between her tiny ones. 

“Poking at the wound’ll do no good,” she says. Seguin grabs onto her; his chest heaves. Tears leak from his eyes, well up from between the swollen lids on the injured side. He struggles for breath, a high whining sound accompanying each exhalation. 

The doc starts measuring up the next round of laudanum. 

Lily bows low over Seguin’s head, almost touching his brow with her own. Her shoulders shake, and Jordie can’t catch the words of her quiet commiseration. 

“Here,” Gretzky says, a shot-sized cup in his hand. “Help him up.”

Jordie lifts as gently as he can, and Lily supports his head. The doctor gets the medicine down Seguin’s throat in between his gasping sobs. 

“Don’t fight it,” Lily whispers as they lay him back down. “Just rest. Sleep. It does no good to fight.”

Breath by breath Seguin quiets. He’s asleep when Jamie returns to town.


	17. Chapter 17

There’s not enough light to track by, but Jamie doesn’t figure those boys from Boston have anywhere to go but south to Cheyenne. He follows the road, letting his horse pick her footing at her own pace as long as she keeps moving. 

The most likely point of missing them will be if the men have left the road and found a place for their camp. If he goes until dawn and sees neither villains nor trail of them he’ll turn back.

He rides, his every sense open to the world, ready for any sign, any clue. He expects the anger to grow in him, for his anguish at seeing Tyler’s wounds to turn to raging vengeance. Instead he’s left with a growing sense of purpose. To find the coin, to bring it back. 

There’s nothing he can do to help Tyler live, save that, so he puts those worries aside. Locks them in the chest where he’d laid his troubling thoughts during the war, where he’d shut away every shred of fear and doubt. 

He rides until he sees the flicker of a camp fire ahead. He guides his horse off of the trail and ties her rein to a branch. Brings rifle and pistol and the good sharp edge of his knife with him as he creeps up on them.

Four years out of the army and his body moves like it was only yesterday that he was soft-footing through the night on a mission to take the lives of other men for the sin of being as sure in their convictions as he was in his. 

These men are still awake. The night isn’t cold, but one is huddled around their fire anyway, trying to chase away the chill of what they’d done. The other is washing his hands in the edge of the river at the far edge of the fire’s light. 

Jamie knows this place, where sometimes wagons or men will wait a day or two for the ford to run low if they catch the river after a storm. The flow is broad and shallow here, but the bottom is rocky, treacherous. The wagoneers call it ‘butcher’s meadow’ for the number of horses and oxen who break a leg and begin their final service to their masters here.

“…think he’s alive?” one of the Holston brothers asks, the one who’d carried the locket, Jamie thinks.

“I said I don’t know,” snaps the other like it’s a conversation that’s oft repeated between them. 

“We shouldn’t have run,” the first says. “It makes us look guilty.”

“Guilty of what? Men like that find their fate every day up here. Not a single tear will be shed over a man of his character.”

Jamie watches, and listens, and waits. The men make tea and drink it, eat some jerky and biscuits they’d brought on the trail. It’s a long time before the dissettlement of their nerves quiets enough to send them to their bedrolls. It’s too dark to cross the ford and too early to stay awake waiting on the sun and by and by they unroll their blankets, prop their heads on their saddles and sleep.

The mud sucks at Jamie’s boots as he steps out of the footprints he’d crouched in for so long. One of their horses looks up and nickers a question at him, but he’s not moving like a threat to them and it settles again.

Neither of the men stirs. 

If Jamie had anything like pity left for men who’d made themselves his enemy, he’d feel sorry for them, soft stupid things that they are.

They’ve each got a gunbelt close at hand and Jamie picks them up and loops them over his left shoulder for safe-keeping. Thomas, the one who’d done most of the talking, seems the bigger threat. Jamie goes over to the far side of the sleeping man and puts his boot on his throat, not enough weight to crush it, but plenty to cut off his air and any rational line of thought. 

John startles awake at his brother’s kicking and flailing, scrambles for his gun. Jamie waits with his rifle on his shoulder for him to realize his weapon is far from him, and for his attention to settle on Jamie. 

“No, no, what do you want?” the one with the air to speak asks. He crouches with one hand up like it’ll stop the bullet. Hovers on the edge of attacking and trying his luck at running away. 

“You took something from Mr. Seguin,” Jamie says. “I’m taking it back to him. I’d rather not have to search your corpses for it.”

“He’s got it,” he says, pointing a trembling hand at his brother. Jamie moves his boot from throat to chest and waits until Thomas stops dying. 

“You took a coin from Mr. Seguin,” Jamie says when Thomas has stopped wheezing and choking. “I’ll take it now.”

Jamie steps back so he can keep both of them well in his vision and field of fire as Thomas curls to his knees, pats himself down with desperate trembling. 

“Here,” he says, hand shaking as he offers it. Jamie takes it from his hand and Thomas surges up from the ground, flinging a handful of muck at Jamie’s face as he attacks. 

The fight is over before it begins, Jamie swinging around with the stock of the rifle making contact against the side of his head. Thomas crumples back down and John still hasn’t found his nerve. 

Later, Jamie will be unable to target the exact moment he realized he was there to kill them, that the hunt could end no other way. 

He drops the rifle and strides over Thomas’ unconscious body, grabs hold of John and hauls him to his feet without a loss of momentum. John struggles and Jamie catches him across the skull with a blow from his elbow to settle him.

It’s only a few strides to the river and he kicks John’s feet from under him and drives him down into the shallow water and the rocks below. 

John wriggles in his grip, fighting to get his head above water. Jamie has a vision of Tyler, lying in three inches of mud, using every ounce of energy he had to keep from drowning. Tyler waiting in desperation for Jamie to find him.

He blinks and John is still, the water around him becalmed. 

“No,” Thomas moans from behind him. “Johnny, no.” Jamie leaves John there in the water and goes to where his brother is endeavoring to rise.

The coin glints in the churned-up dirt of the campsite and Jamie collects it up, wipes it clean and checks for the notch to be certain that there was no deception in that regard.

Thomas drowns as easily as John had, and when there’s no last sign of life left in either of them, Jamie takes their gun belts and buckles them around their waists and then pushes them into the swifter and deeper water at the end of the ford, lets the river take them away.

He cleans their camp, rolls their bedding and saddles their horses, kicks dirt over their fire. 

He leads the horses to the midpoint of the river and sends them on their way. 

The newspaper in Boston will have a five line note in the paper, weeks later, about the tragedy sure to happen when city men go to the wild parts of the world. The author of the article will speculate that one must have fallen, crossing the ford in the dark, and his brother gone after him, and both of them drown.

Jamie holds tight to the precious coin and hikes to own his horse. 

Then he rides for town, back to Tyler.


	18. Chapter 18

It’s close enough to morning that Jordie has yet to begin to worry Jamie’s lost himself again, when the sound of hooves stop outside stop at the door. He turns from Mr. Seguin’s sick-bed in time to see Jamie enter the establishment. 

Dried mud clings to Jamie’s clothing, the shadow of a splatter against his cheek, but he seems well, mind and form as well connected as Jordie could have hoped. His eyes afix on Seguin’s broken and bandaged form as if Lily and Jordie were bodiless spirits.

He strides over, goes down to one knee by the cot, reaches to touch Seguin’s hand. Hesitates and then takes it in his own. He presses a coin to Seguin’s palm, curls his fingers around it when Seguin is too drugged to hold it on his own. 

“Are they dead?” Lily asks, her sweet voice cold and hard. 

Jamie looks up and holds her gaze. 

“I rode after them until morning. I saw no sign so I came back.” 

And then he nods, once, never taking his eyes from hers. 

Jordie winces. That answers that. At least Jamie has the presence of mind to not openly admit the deed. If there’s any justice in the world, he was aware enough to take the time to hide the crime as well. They’d made enough men disappear during the war for it to be among his well-practiced skills.

Jamie’s attention returns to Mr. Seguin’s face, his eyes darting from bruise to cut to scrape. 

Jordie has never seen Jamie in love before, but Mr. Seguin isn’t the first handsome man they’ve met. It seems unlikely that Seguin’s pretty face was the only thing Jamie noticed about him. Jordie has faith that Jamie is a better man than to turn his back on someone he cares about because of a change in their looks. 

Lily brings the stool she’d been using and Jamie settles himself. 

“Doc Gretzky says that companionship eases the spirit and helps the body heal,” Lily says, and Jordie frowns, wonders when he missed that bit.

“He asked for you,” Jordie says, because that was the truth. “Every time he woke, your name was the first on his lips.”

Jamie curls in on himself like Jordie’s words have hurt instead of bringing him comfort. 

Lily moves to Jordie’s side. “The doctor is calling on the widows, but he’ll be back soon. I’ll send Ezra to wait outside to run messages for you, should Mr. Seguin’s condition change,” she tells Jamie, and then she rests her hand lightly upon Jordie’s arm and nudges him towards the door.

“If you could walk me back to the hotel, Mr. Benn?”

If Jamie was going to lose himself to worry or sorrow, Jordie guesses it would have been before now. It seems safe enough to leave his side, to take Miss Lily back to her room.

“Jamie, do you need anything?”

“No,” Jamie says, but his voice is dry and Jordie can’t figure he ate much on the road. He’ll run breakfast over after he completes his gentlemanly task.

“Keep a cool cloth on his head,” Lily says, and then gives Jordie a less-subtle nudge towards the door.

=============

Jamie blinks. He’s alone in the doc’s office with Tyler’s hand in his. Jordie and Lily are gone. He doesn’t remember them leaving, but an echo of her voice tells him to change the wet cloth on Tyler’s forehead. 

The cleaning of Tyler’s wounds has done nothing for the gruesomeness of the injuries, skin swollen purpled and tight over half his face, cuts and bruises everywhere. 

Jamie takes the cloth off of Tyler’s face and dips it in the bowl nearby, wrings out enough water that it won’t drip and lays it gently back on his forehead.

Having a task helps him hold his mind and body in the same place and time, keeps him from getting lost in the memory of John’s hair between his fingers as he pushed his face under the surface of the river. 

He’s never been the one to tend an injured person like this, and the novelty forces him to pay attention. He’s held the hands of men while they died of their wounds, yes, or carried them to the field doctors on the rare instances the irregulars’ work was close enough to do so. There was never time to sit at a sick-bed during the war. 

He’d seen his mother sometimes, being nurse to the runaways who’d made it to their farm, some so starved and worn that illness had ravaged their bodies even as their souls exalted in their freedom, but she’d always sent Jamie and Jordie away.

Looking down at Tyler, Jamie can see part of her reason, the amount of dignity that’s stripped from a person by injury so severe.

He’s changed the cloth twice when Jordie comes back, a tin plate in hand and glass bottle under his arm.

“You need to eat,” Jordie tells him. 

Jamie sets Tyler’s hand gentle on his chest and takes the plate. Chews and swallows without enough thought to even identify what it is that’s on his fork.

The plate is gone and so is Jordie. Jamie shakes himself, unsure how much time has passed. He reaches to check, and the cloth on Tyler’s brow almost to a warmth and dryness that’ll be no benefit. He hurries to change it. Thinks maybe he should send Ezra for Jordie or Lily to come help him. 

“Sir, you can’t!” Ezra’s voice comes through the thin walls, and then the door bangs open.

Jamie whirls, hand reaching down for his gun. 

“Sheriff, come quick!” It’s one of the other business owners, one of the small saloons that is still behind walls of canvas and not wood.

“No.” Jamie cuts into the man’s stream of words, something about a man holding him at gunpoint while he stole three bottles of liquor. “I laid the star aside. I’m no sheriff today.”

The man sputters. “Then upon whom shall I call?” he asks, outraged.

“That’s no concern of mine,” Jamie says. Turns and stands to his full height. “Just get out.”

The man goes and Ezra pops his head in. “Sorry, Mr. Benn, I tried to stop him.”

Jamie shakes his head, takes to his stool again. “Letting me know he was coming was enough. Thank you for guarding the door as well as waiting for errands to run.”

Ezra nods, turns his wool cap around in his hands. “I don’t know Mr. Seguin as well as some others do, but he tips well when he sends me on a run for him.”

Jamie squeezes out the cloth, dips it again and rinses the heat of Tyler’s body out of it. 

The door closes quietly and they’re alone again.

The rise and fall of Tyler’s breath falters as Jamie lays the cloth again on his forehead, and for a moment a numb terror sweeps his body, a feeling of helplessness should Tyler not draw another.

And then Tyler takes a deeper breath than Jamie has yet witnessed since he found him in the mud, his body going rigid and his good eye opening. 

“You’re safe, you’re safe,” Jamie murmurs. If it’s an emotion other than fear on Tyler’s face, the words will do no harm, and if he is afraid, the words are the only comfort Jamie has to offer.

Tyler stares around a moment, orienting himself to the room and his condition. Jamie holds gently to his hand, ready to release him if Tyler doesn’t want his touch.

Tyler blinks, turns his face Jamie’s way.

“Jamie,” he says, his voice a rasp like a shovel over hard dry ground, and then “Water.”

Jamie settles Tyler’s hand on his chest and gets the pitcher and a scrap of cloth. He uses the wet cloth to wipe Tyler’s cracked lips, and then squeezes out careful drops between them. 

It’s a long process, achingly slow. 

“You’re safe,” Jamie murmurs again. Tyler closes his mouth against the water, so he lays it aside, changes the cloth on Tyler’s forehead again. The pain he is in shows in the lines of his face, the careful way he breathes.

“Tommy,” Tyler says. “John.”

“Not coming back,” Jamie says. He finds the coin where it’s fallen between the wrinkles of the blanket and presses it into Tyler’s palm.

Tyler takes a slow breath and then nods. 

“They were so mad.”

Jamie doesn’t know what to say to that. He takes Tyler’s hand up in his, the coin between their palms, and Tyler squeezes weakly at his fingers. 

“Are you in much pain?” Jamie asks, though the answer is obvious. “Should I send for the doctor?”

“Not yet,” Tyler says. He seems to be slipping towards sleep again. “Jus’ stay with me.”

“I’m not leaving,” Jamie tells him. 

Tyler’s fully asleep by the time Gretzky gets back, leaving his black bag at the table by the door and washing his hands there in the basin. 

“Mr. Benn,” Gretzky greets him, and then bends over the patient. “Has he been awake?”

“For a short while,” Jamie says. “He took a little water and went to sleep again.”

Gretzky nods. He checks Tyler’s temperature with the back of his hand, pulls out an ear-horn and listens to his chest. Jamie stands and steps back to give him room.

Gretzky turns the sheet down to Tyler’s waist, and Jamie feels like it’s rudeness to see him like this without his permission but he can’t force himself to turn away.

The doctor presses all around on Tyler’s torso, from the bottom edge of the wrap around his ribs down to the scoop of his pelvis. “It still doesn’t look like he’s bleeding inside his belly,” Gretzky says. “That’s good news; a torn or ruptured organ would be his shortest path to a wooden box.”

Tyler stirs awake at the handling, wincing in pain.

“Does this hurt?” Gretzky asks, pressing in, and Tyler gasps. Jamie grinds his jaw. Putting the doctor through the wall won’t improve Tyler’s s.

Gretzky pokes around a bit more and then nods. “Jamie, help me get him up for another dose of laudanum.”

Moving him hurts Tyler, and Jamie keeps up a stream of whispered apologies as he gets him to a half-seated position, tips his head back for Gretzky to give him the medicine.

“I’d like to keep him here through the night,” Gretzky says. “Unless he takes a poorly turn before morning, I see no reason not to move him back to the hotel.”

Jamie nods. “I’ll sleep here tonight then. You can send me your bill when you’ve tallied it up. Did you see Ezra still around outside?”

“He was waiting by the door when I came in.”

Jamie doesn’t want to leave Tyler for even the time it takes to walk to the door, tell Ezra to go get a bedroll from Jordie for Jamie to sleep on and return, but he does it. 

When night falls, Jamie lays his bedding on the floor at Tyler’s side, close enough to hear him breathe in the dark.

=======


End file.
